Udaipur Times: Udaipur's First Local Online News and Community Portal
Udaipur Times, published online at udaipurtimes.com, is an online-only news, information and community portal serving Udaipur in southern Rajasthan, India. Founded in May 2010, it described itself from the outset as a first-of-its-kind local online portal for the city — a digital home for breaking news, daily events and stories about life in the city widely known as the City of Lakes. More than a decade and a half after its launch, it remains one of the most recognisable digital names attached to Udaipur, read by residents, by people with family and business ties to the city, and by visitors planning time in one of Rajasthan's most visited destinations.
The portal's proposition was simple but, in 2010, still unusual for a city of Udaipur's size: that a single mid-sized Indian city deserved its own continuously updated online news source, rather than a few columns inside a state-level newspaper or a section of a national website. That hyperlocal bet shaped everything the publication became — its mix of hard local news, event listings, hospitality reviews and personality interviews, and its role as a promotional platform for local, national and global businesses wanting to reach a Udaipur audience.
Origins and founding in 2010
Udaipur Times was founded in May 2010. Its early self-description presented it as the first local online news, information, blog and community portal of Udaipur city. The timing matters. In 2010, social media use in India was growing, smartphones were still becoming common, and most established newspapers in Rajasthan were only beginning to treat their websites as more than digital copies of the printed paper. A web-native publication built entirely around one city was therefore a distinct experiment in Indian regional media.
Professional listings identify Zaheer Abbas with the title of founder and editor at UdaipurTimes, reflecting the small, founder-led structure typical of early Indian city portals. Like many such ventures, the portal grew out of blogging and community publishing rather than out of a legacy print newsroom. Its growth was driven by regular, searchable, locally specific content at a time when search engines were becoming the main way residents and members of the diaspora looked for news from home.
What Udaipur Times publishes
The portal publishes breaking news and daily local events from Udaipur, alongside reviews of hotels and restaurants, interviews with personalities connected to the city, and feature stories from in and around Udaipur. That combination — news plus useful city information — is central to its identity. A reader can arrive for a developing news story and stay for guidance on where to eat, what is on, or who is shaping the city's cultural and business life.
This breadth reflects Udaipur's economy. Tourism and hospitality are major employers, so hotel and restaurant coverage is not lifestyle filler; it is business information for a city whose visitors support a large service sector. Interviews with achievers and public figures, meanwhile, give the portal a community-record function, documenting people who have, in its own framing, achieved for themselves and for the city.
The city it serves: Udaipur and Mewar
Understanding Udaipur Times requires understanding Udaipur. The city was founded in 1559 by Maharana Udai Singh II as the capital of the Mewar kingdom, set among artificial lakes in the Aravalli hills. The Sisodia Rajput heritage of Mewar, the City Palace, Lake Pichola and a dense calendar of festivals give Udaipur an identity far larger than its population. It is also a pilgrimage base for nearby Nathdwara, Eklingji and Kesariyaji, and a district headquarters with the usual pressures of a growing Indian city — water, traffic, encroachment, lake conservation and municipal services.
A local portal in such a city covers two overlapping worlds. One is the heritage and visitor city: palaces, hotels, festivals and lakefront development. The other is the everyday administrative city of wards, municipal corporation decisions and citizen services. Udaipur was selected under India's Smart Cities Mission, with area-based development proposed for the old city and lake conservation among its stated priorities, and stories of that kind — how a historic city modernises without losing what makes it distinctive — are the natural territory of a publication like Udaipur Times.
Audience and reach
Early descriptions of the portal put its readership at more than one lakh — over 100,000 — readers a month, viewing more than 2.5 lakh pages. Those figures, from the portal's first years, illustrate the scale a single-city site could reach once residents, students, tourists and non-resident Udaipur families began searching for city news online. Its stated audience has always been people directly or indirectly related to Udaipur, a definition that deliberately includes the diaspora and former residents as well as people living in the city today.
The portal also extended onto mobile through an Android app distributed under the Udaipur Times name, with updates over the years adding news categories, pagination and performance improvements. For a local publisher, an app presence and social distribution matter because much city news — an accident, a weather event, a festival announcement, a civic disruption — is consumed quickly, on a phone, close to the moment it happens.
A platform for local business
From early on, Udaipur Times positioned itself as a destination for digital promotions for local, national and global businesses. That commercial role is typical of sustainable hyperlocal media: advertising and promotional content from hotels, restaurants, retailers, educational institutions and service providers fund the news operation. In a tourism-led city, the boundary between editorial hospitality coverage and commercial promotion is an important one for readers to understand, but the model itself — a city audience aggregated in one trusted local destination, sold to businesses that want that audience — is how many of India's independent city portals have survived without a print edition or a large media group behind them.
Place in Rajasthan's media landscape
Rajasthan has a strong Hindi newspaper tradition, with large state papers covering Udaipur as one district among many. An English-accessible, online-only city portal occupies a different niche: faster, searchable, city-exclusive, and legible to readers outside the state and outside India. Udaipur Times does not replace the district reporting of the big papers; it complements it with a publication whose entire identity is the city itself. Its longevity since 2010 is itself significant, because many early Indian hyperlocal blogs and portals from the same period disappeared within a few years as social platforms absorbed local attention.
Community and everyday city life
The words information, blog and community in the portal's founding description signal an ambition broader than a news wire. City portals of this type typically carry school and examination information, job and business notices, obituaries and achievements, festival coverage and practical updates that help residents navigate the city. In Udaipur, where religious tourism, weddings, heritage events and seasonal tourism all shape the calendar, that service layer is part of why readers return daily rather than only during major news events.
Digital-first journalism in a heritage city
Udaipur Times is also a case study in how digital publishing changed who could run a city newsroom. Without printing presses, distribution trucks or a television licence, a small team could publish continuously, update stories as they developed, and be found globally by anyone searching for Udaipur. The trade-offs are familiar: speed and reach against limited reporting resources, and dependence on advertising and platform traffic. The portal's survival across the shift from desktop web to social feeds to apps suggests an ability to adapt its distribution while keeping its core subject — one city — unchanged.
Why Udaipur Times matters
For readers, Udaipur Times matters as a dedicated record of a specific place: its news, its businesses, its personalities and its daily life, published from within the city rather than summarised from Jaipur or Delhi. For students of Indian media, it matters as an early, durable example of the single-city online portal model that began around 2010. And for Udaipur itself, it matters because cities with strong local media tend to have stronger civic memory — an archive of what happened, who did what, and how the city changed, available to anyone who searches for it.
Udaipur Times today
Today Udaipur Times continues to operate at udaipurtimes.com as an online-only portal for Udaipur, Rajasthan, covering city news, tourism, business and community stories from the Lake City. Its founding promise — breaking news, daily events, reviews and interviews gathered in one local destination — remains the clearest summary of what it does. In a media environment now dominated by national apps and social feeds, a publication that has spent well over a decade doing one thing, covering Udaipur for people who care about Udaipur, retains a distinct and defensible place.
