Aastha TV

Aastha TV, whose name means faith in Hindi, began in 2000 as the project of Kirit C. Mehta, a Dubai based businessman who built a channel around Hindu spiritual discourses, pilgrimage coverage, devotional music and coverage of major religious festivals and ceremonies. Within its first year the channel had already launched across four continents, Asia, Africa, Europe and Australia, an unusually fast international rollout for a devotional broadcaster, and by 2006 Aastha TV was reaching an estimated 160 countries worldwide.

That same year, 2006, ownership of the channel changed hands entirely. Mehta sold Aastha TV to associates of Swami Ramdev, the yoga teacher and entrepreneur who had built a large following through televised yoga instruction, for a reported sixteen crore rupees. The channel is now controlled by Acharya Balkrishna, Ramdev's longtime business partner, through Aastha Broadcasting Network Ltd, operating under the umbrella of Vedic Broadcasting Limited and headquartered in Noida, Uttar Pradesh. Under its new owners, the channel's programming increasingly featured Ramdev himself alongside other prominent spiritual figures including the storyteller Morari Bapu and the teacher Sister Shivani, folding devotional broadcasting into a wider commercial ecosystem built around yoga, ayurveda and wellness products.

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.