Shobhana Bhartia is the Vice Chairperson of The Hindustan Times Limited (HT). It has come to the knowledge being an astute businesswoman she is at present concentrating on the sprawling television marketing both in the national and international scenario. In her own words, "We may possibly look at the television business, not in the immediate future, but more on a five-year horizon." Well, this---after a failed attempt at television, Home TV, in the 1990s. And equally, never jumps into anything without adequate preparation. "The infrastructure is taking time. We'll launch next year," she adds, on the company's eponymous paper's much-awaited launch in Mumbai, the country's biggest newspaper advertising market and bastion of its fierce competitor for daily morning readership, The Times of India (TOI).
It should be taken account, that Shobhana Bhartia hails from the Birla clan and joined the family business in 1986. In the recent years she has been found something of an image breaker and has been dedicated herself thoroughly to transform an old sluggish organization in a sector that never considered itself as a viable industry, into something markedly more innovative, dynamic and attention-getting. It is to her credit that she has been able to change the old shibboleth notions of her company and has inducted fresh innovative concepts. How has this been proved? In the present day, she leads a vibrant ten-edition strong newspaper that has already proved all its sceptics wrong in Delhi, and could possibly give the country's most famous media monopoly (TOI in Mumbai) a serious case of jitters. In addition, she has also been found to show signs of aggression on other fronts---as when Bhartia took on the findings of the National Readership Survey (NRS). "The reason we challenged the NRS findings was not because there was a minor difference, not because the Times of India came ahead of us, but because those figures were ridiculous," according to her own assessment.
