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Faith TV, by the Numbers and by Its Critics

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Faith TV, by the Numbers and by Its Critics

By its own network's account, Aastha TV reaches more than 20 million households with a total viewership exceeding 100 million people, broadcast in Hindi alongside regional language versions in Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Gujarati, plus dedicated international feeds for the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and continental Europe. Vedic Broadcasting Limited, the channel's parent, also operates related spinoffs including a channel for devotional music and one devoted specifically to Vedic content, extending the same audience across a small family of related channels rather than one signal alone.

Aastha TV's growth has not gone unexamined. Indian media commentary has scrutinized what it describes as the economics behind India's devotional television more broadly, describing a pattern across the country's spiritual broadcasting sector in which channels nominally organized around religious teaching are, in practice, owned by corporate interests and built to promote the products, causes and public profiles of the gurus who front them. Aastha TV's own ownership path fits that description closely: a channel built by a businessman, sold to the associates of a guru turned entrepreneur, and now run by the same corporate structure that controls Ramdev's Patanjali consumer products business, blurring the line between devotional broadcasting and commercial promotion in ways the channel's critics argue is worth watching.

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