About Sarkaritel

Sarkaritel: India's Quarter-Century-Old Portal for Government News, PSUs and Ministries

Sarkaritel is a New Delhi-based online news portal covering government policy, bureaucracy, public sector undertakings and administrative affairs at sarkaritel.com. With the tagline "Government News, PSU & Ministry Updates," it serves readers who track the Indian state machinery — from ministers and civil servants to businesspeople dealing with the government. Founded by journalist-entrepreneur Ameya Sathaye, who launched it in 2001 at the age of 26, the portal has grown over 25 years into a directory-scale website holding more than 100,000 pages of information on India's government. It is owned by M/s AMS Creations and Media Private Limited.

Origins: Launched in 2001 by a 26-Year-Old Entrepreneur

Sarkaritel is the brainchild of Ameya Sathaye, who launched the portal in 2001 when he was about 26 years old. The site's own about page notes that it has been active since 2000, making it one of India's oldest continuously operating digital news portals — a pioneer from the era when internet penetration in India was still minimal. Sathaye identified a gap that seems obvious in retrospect: nobody was systematically publishing the coordinates, structures and workings of the Indian government online. While mainstream media covered politics as spectacle, Sarkaritel covered the state as a system — ministries, departments, public sector undertakings and the bureaucratic hierarchy. That unglamorous but essential niche has sustained the portal for a quarter of a century.

A Directory-Scale Portal: 100,000+ Pages

Over its 25-year history, Sarkaritel.com has grown into a massive website containing more than 100,000 pages of information on the Government of India. Its directory covers ministries and departments, state governments, public sector undertakings, embassies based in India, and Indian missions and posts abroad. For anyone needing to find the right official, office or institutional contact within the Indian state — from a minister and his staff down through the entire bureaucratic hierarchy — the portal positions itself as a one-stop solution. This directory function is the site's most distinctive asset: it is part news outlet, part reference work, a combination that has given it unusual durability in the volatile world of digital media.

News Coverage: Policy, Bureaucracy and PSUs

Alongside the directory, Sarkaritel operates as a niche news website disseminating news and information related to government policies and programmes to users across the globe. Its stated objective is to serve as a bridge between the common man and the government. Current coverage illustrates the beat: telecom and the Department of Telecommunications (broadband milestones, SIM regulation, 6G initiatives), Indian Railways (new train services, infrastructure projects), the power sector (Coal India supply, POWERGRID, NTPC results), public sector enterprises such as NHPC, and flagship government programs like PM GatiShakti. The reporting is factual and institutional in tone — announcements, appointments, project updates and policy decisions — written for readers who need to know what the state is doing rather than commentary on why.

Reach: 900,000 Hits From India and 155 Countries

According to the portal's own account, Sarkaritel.com receives as many as 900,000 hits from India and more than 155 countries abroad. The audience profile is telling: people from the political and business worlds who need reliable information on government personnel and programs. For diplomats, lobbyists, journalists, consultants and investors, knowing who holds which post — and how the machinery is organized — is operational intelligence. Sarkaritel's directory-plus-news model serves exactly this need, making it a working tool for professionals rather than casual reading. Its longevity and traffic suggest the model works: a specialist information service with a global user base, built before "niche B2B media" was a recognized category in India.

DiplomacyIndia.com: The Diplomatic Sibling

Building on Sarkaritel's success, the management launched a second website devoted to India's external engagement: DiplomacyIndia.com. Described as the first initiative of its kind outside the government fold, it seeks to supplement the Ministry of External Affairs' own communication by explaining India's foreign policy toward other countries and elaborating on the diplomatic, economic, commercial and business dimensions of India's relationships and how they impact the country. The site had a successful public launch in November 2015, attended by Union Ministers, ambassadors, academics and officials, and has since built a platform for discussion on tourism, culture, connectivity, hospitality and people-to-people contact. The need for it arose, the management says, from feedback by Sarkaritel users worldwide who wanted detailed information on India's diplomatic initiatives — and from foreign missions in India seeking a media platform for public diplomacy.

Water Conservation Advocacy: The Jal Prahari Samman

Sarkaritel has committed itself to water conservation awareness, describing itself as motivated by the Prime Minister's call for the movement. In December 2024, the portal signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Water Mission under the Ministry of Jal Shakti to promote and create awareness about water conservation and tree planting under the "Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam" campaign for a period of one year. It has organized five editions of the Jal Prahari Samman Samaroh — honouring water conservators from around the globe — in December 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024, with support from the Ministry of Jal Shakti, the National Jal Jeevan Mission, the National Water Mission and the United Nations-affiliated UNOPS. The award has since been renamed the Jal Yodha Samman. This civic-advocacy dimension — a media house running a national awards program with government and UN backing — is unusual and underscores the portal's institutional embeddedness.

The Founder: Ameya Sathaye's Profile

Ameya Sathaye describes himself as an active media person for the last 24 years, and his profile reflects an unusually international career for an Indian digital journalist. He has travelled widely across Kazakhstan, the USA, Germany, the United Kingdom, Poland, Taiwan, Uzbekistan, New Zealand, Australia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Indonesia and Singapore. He attended the World Hindi Conference in the US in 2007 under the aegis of the Indian Foreign Ministry, completed an NDC course sponsored by the Republic of China (Taiwan) in 2008, was nominated by the Uzbek Embassy in India as an international election observer for Uzbekistan's parliamentary election in 2014 and presidential elections in 2014 and 2016, and participated in the World Internet Conference 2015 in Wuzhen, China. This globe-spanning engagement with diplomacy, elections and internet governance has clearly shaped both Sarkaritel's institutional focus and the DiplomacyIndia.com spinoff.

Ownership and Contact

Sarkaritel.com and DiplomacyIndia.com are owned by M/s AMS Creations and Media Private Limited, with Ameya Sathaye serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of both. The portal publishes its contact details openly: a mobile number (+91 9810072220) and email addresses including newseditor@sarkaritel.com and ameya.sathaye@sarkaritel.com, alongside editor@diplomacyindia.com. This transparency about ownership and contact is consistent with the site's identity as an institutional information service — one that does business with the political and corporate world and behaves accordingly.

Place in India's Digital Media History

Sarkaritel belongs to the first generation of Indian digital media — launched when the web was young, surviving the dot-com bust, the rise of social media, and the smartphone revolution. Most of its contemporaries from 2000–2001 did not survive; Sarkaritel did, by serving a need that never went away: structured information about the Indian state. In today's crowded digital news market, its directory of 100,000+ pages remains a moat that newer, news-cycle-driven competitors cannot easily replicate. As India's government digitizes further and the appetite for policy intelligence grows, the portal's quarter-century head start in organizing knowledge about the state may prove to be its most valuable asset.

Outlook

Twenty-five years after a 26-year-old entrepreneur launched it, Sarkaritel continues to do what it has always done: document the Indian government in exhaustive detail and report its workings to a global audience of professionals. The DiplomacyIndia.com expansion, the water-conservation partnership with the National Water Mission, and the steady stream of ministry and PSU coverage all point to a portal that has found its lane and stayed in it. In an era of hot takes and viral outrage, Sarkaritel's institutional, reference-driven model is a reminder that some of the most useful journalism is also the least glamorous — the patient work of keeping the record of the state.