The National Readership Survey 2005 has revealed a significant increase in the reach of the press (dailies and magazines) over the last three years with an addition of 21 million readers between 2002 and 2005. It has also found that the number of readers of newspapers and magazines in rural India is now almost equal to those in urban India.
In one of the largest surveys of its kind in the world, the National Readership Studies Council (NRSC) on Wednesday released its results based on a sample size of over 2,61,212 house-to-house interviews spread over 536 districts in 24 States. The study covered 522 publications (221 dailies and 301 magazines).
Despite the growth of the reach of satellite television – from 134 million individuals watching in an average week in 2002 to 190 millions individuals in 2005 – the NRS 2005 has recorded a significant growth in the reach of the print medium in the last three years – from 179 million to 200 million people aged 15 years and above. However, while the reach of the press has fallen in urban India in the same period, from 48 per cent to 46 per cent, it has grown in rural India from 17 per cent to 19 per cent. As a result, of the total of 200 million readers in the country, 98 million are from rural India and 101 million from urban areas.
Daily newspapers, the NRS 2005 finds, drive the growth in the press medium, with their reach rising in the last three years from 23 per cent to 24 per cent. In the same period, the reach of magazines has declined from 13 to 10 per cent.
In terms of readership, urban and rural, Hindi daily newspapers are ranked the highest with Dainik Jagran at number one with a readership of 21,123,000 and Dainik Bhaskar with 17,373,000 readers ranked number two. Of the dailies in the top 10, nine are in the regional languages – five in Hindi, one in Telugu, one in Tamil, one in Marathi and one in Bengali – and only one in English. These figures exclude the reach of Malayalam newspapers.
According to the NRS 2005, one of the reasons for the increase in the growth of readership of newspapers is increasing literacy as measured by the ability to read and understand any language. The study estimates that in these terms, literacy has risen from 62.5 per cent to 70.6 per cent in the last three years with the rise being higher in rural areas – from 55.6 per cent to 64.6 per cent – than in urban India where it has grown from 79.3 per cent to 84.5 per cent. This suggests, states the study, that there is scope for further growth in the print medium as there are still 314 million people who can read and understand any language but who do not read any publication.
Apart from readership data, the survey also documents the reach of the radio, which has stagnated at 23 per cent of the population listening to any radio station in an average week. In urban areas, however, the audience for radio has grown because of the introduction of FM radio. On the other hand, in rural areas it has dropped in the last three years from 25 to 23 per cent today.
