From Family Broadcaster to Ramdev's Media Empire

Sanskar TV has changed hands twice since its June 2000 launch, and each sale traces the same broader pattern Indian business journalism has documented across the country's devotional television sector: a channel built around religious programming, owned in practice by whichever corporate group happens to control it at the time. It began under Dilip and Dinesh Kabra and Kishore Mohotta, an independent broadcasting venture with no larger media conglomerate behind it. In 2008 it passed to the Aditya Pittie-led Pittie Group, a diversified Indian business house whose interests already reached into companies with ties to the Patanjali empire being built by the yoga teacher and entrepreneur Swami Ramdev.

Ramdev acquired Sanskar TV outright in 2015, folding it into a media portfolio he had already begun assembling with Aastha TV. Reporting on the ownership structure found the majority of Sanskar Info TV Private Ltd's shares held by Acharya Balkrishna, Ramdev's longtime business partner and the public face of Patanjali's corporate filings, through companies he controls, the identical arrangement documented at Aastha TV. In 2016 and 2017 Balkrishna and Ramdev appointed Manoj Tyagi, who had previously headed the company's sales and marketing team, as chief executive, a leadership choice that made the channel's new ownership visible in its own management structure rather than only on paper.