Sanskar TV

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.

Sanskar TV describes its own programming as centered on devotion rather than on abstract spiritual instruction, a distinction that shows in its schedule. Discourses from established spiritual teachers, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Swami Ramdev himself, and Jagadguru Kripalu Maharaj among them, sit alongside bhajans, kirtans and coverage broadcast directly from Hindu pilgrimage sites, aiming the channel at viewers already inside devotional practice rather than at newcomers being introduced to it. Given Ramdev's own public identity as a yoga teacher, wellness programming grounded in yoga and Ayurveda runs through the schedule as well, extending the channel's religious content into the health and lifestyle territory Ramdev's wider Patanjali business already occupies.

That programming has traveled well beyond India. Sanskar TV expanded onto DISH platforms in the United States in 2010 and reached the United Kingdom and continental Europe via Sky in March 2018, giving it dedicated Sanskar USA and Sanskar UK feeds alongside the original Indian broadcast and a further Sanskar Nepal channel. The 2019 Antarrashtriya Yoga Diwas Media Samman award for its yoga coverage, and a 2022 recognition from the UK-based World Book of Records, mark the channel as an established presence in its category rather than a fringe operation, even as its ownership sits inside the same for-profit corporate structure examined elsewhere on this axis at Aastha TV.