Sadhna TV

Sadhna TV frames its own founding, on April 18, 2003, in unusually deliberate terms for an Indian devotional channel: a socio-spiritual effort towards sanctity, and, by its own account, the first satellite channel in the country to place social leaders and spiritual leaders on the same platform rather than treating devotion and civic life as separate broadcasting categories. That framing has held across two decades of rebranding, the channel appeared first as Sadhna Gold before settling into Sadhna TV and later Sadhna National, while keeping the same underlying mission statement.

Behind that mission sits an ordinary commercial media company. Sadhna TV is owned and operated by Sadhna Broadcasting Ltd, a BSE-listed firm since renamed Crystal Business System Limited and controlled by Rakesh Gupta, with a portfolio that runs well past devotional programming: the devotional channel Ishwar TV, launched in 2010, sits in the same stable as the news channel Sadhna Plus News, the entertainment channel Rishu Movies and others with no religious character at all. Unlike Aastha TV or Sanskar TV, neither Sadhna TV nor its parent company traces back to any religious teacher or institution taking an ownership stake; the company's 2017-18 annual report recorded a turnover of roughly 55.2 crore rupees, ordinary business performance for an Indian regional broadcaster.

Sadhna TV's schedule reads as a survey of Indian devotional television's standard repertoire: spiritual discourses, devotional music, mythological serials dramatizing Hindu epics, astrology segments and yoga and meditation instruction, threaded together with coverage of Indian cultural and social life the channel's own materials describe as central to its mission. What has done the most to build its audience in recent years is narrower than that broad mix, the live katha broadcasts of the preacher Aniruddhacharya Ji Maharaj, whose sessions have made Sadhna TV competitive with better-established devotional channels across northern India.

That popularity sits inside a media company built on diversification rather than devotion. Sadhna Broadcasting Ltd runs Sadhna TV next to the devotional channel Ishwar TV, but also next to Sadhna Plus News, VIP News, the movie channel Rishu Movies and the general channel Har Khabar, a spread of unrelated commercial properties under one BSE-listed holding company. The pattern is the same corporate-ownership shape this axis has already documented at Aastha TV and Sanskar TV, a devotional channel operating as one product line inside a broader commercial media business, except that here no religious teacher or institution sits anywhere in the ownership chain at all; Sadhna TV's devotional content and Rishu Movies' film library answer, in the end, to the same shareholders.