Aroon Purieਅਰੂਨ ਪੁਰੀ

Aroon Purie, born in Lahore in 1944, is the founder-publisher and editor-in-chief of India Today, the magazine he launched in 1975 and built into India's largest media group. A chartered accountant by training, he went on to create Aaj Tak, India's first 24-hour Hindi news channel, and received the Padma Bhushan in 2001 for his contribution to Indian journalism.

Early life and education

Aroon Purie was born in 1944 in Lahore, in the Punjab province of British India, three years before Partition divided the province and Lahore became part of Pakistan. His father, Vidya Vilas Purie, was a film financier who owned Thomson Press, a printing business in Delhi. The family background was business, not journalism, and nothing in his early years pointed to a career in news.

Purie was educated at The Doon School in Dehradun, where one of his contemporaries was Rajiv Gandhi, who later became prime minister of India. He then studied economics at the London School of Economics, taking his B.Sc. in 1965, and qualified as a chartered accountant in the United Kingdom. He later became a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, and in 2024 he completed the Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellowship at Harvard University.

Starting at Thomson Press

Purie began his working life in 1970, joining Thomson Press as a production controller. The press, established in 1967, grew into South Asia's largest commercial printer, with five facilities across India, and Purie later became its managing director. The job taught him the physical side of publishing: paper, presses, deadlines and costs. It also gave him a printer's eye for detail, something colleagues would later say shaped the way he edited.

By his own account, he grew restless with accounting and auditing and wanted a new challenge. The chance came from within the family. His father decided to start a magazine, and Purie, then in his early thirties, was asked to run it. He took the job with enthusiasm, bringing an accountant's discipline to a business that was losing money.

Why did India Today begin during the Emergency?

India Today was launched in 1975 as a fortnightly magazine, in the middle of the Emergency declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, when press freedom in India was sharply curtailed. His father launched the magazine, his sister Madhu Trehan became its editor, and Purie became its publisher. The stated purpose was to fill the information gap for Indians living abroad who wanted reliable news about developments at home.

In 1977, when his sister stepped back for personal reasons, Purie took over the editorial reins as well. The Emergency was lifted the same year, and the magazine took off. It expanded into five languages and became the most widely read publication in India, a position it held for more than a decade. By 2006 it had a readership of more than 11 million.

Building a media group

The magazine's success became the base for a much larger enterprise. Before cable television reached India, Purie popularised a monthly news video journal called News Track, sold on video cassettes, which carried investigative stories. After cable arrived in 1991, News Track became a weekly show on Doordarshan, and in 1995 Aaj Tak was born as a Hindi news programme on the state broadcaster.

Five years later, in 2000, Aaj Tak became an independent 24-hour Hindi news channel, the first of its kind in India. It pioneered the use of outside broadcast vans, then unheard of in Indian television, and Purie also set the journalistic style for the English news channel Headlines Today. He served as editor-in-chief of Reader's Digest India as well.

Under Purie, the India Today Group grew from a single magazine into a media house spanning magazines, television, radio, digital, books, music and education. By 2023 it counted 21 magazines, four television channels and a daily newspaper, and Aaj Tak had become the first news channel anywhere in the world to pass 50 million subscribers on YouTube. India Today itself became one of the country's most trusted news brands.

Honours and later life

Purie was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2001, India's third highest civilian honour, for his contribution to journalism. Earlier honours included the B.D. Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism in 1988, the Journalist of the Year award in 1990 and the G.K. Reddy Memorial Award for 1993-94. He was later given the Hall of Fame Award by the Advertising Club of Kolkata in 2002, a lifetime achievement award from the e4m News Broadcasting Awards in 2011, and the Asian Business Leaders Forum lifetime achievement award in 2022.

He also became the first Indian to be elected chairman of FIPP, the international federation of periodical publishers, and served on the board of the Global Editors Network. In India he chaired the Council of Management of the Audit Bureau of Circulations in 2000-01 and the Confederation of Indian Industry's National Committee on Media in 2001-02.

In October 2017, after 42 years at the head of the group, Purie handed day-to-day control to his daughter Kalli Purie, appointing her vice-chairperson. He said he wanted to spend his time on the group's strategic direction and on exploring new opportunities, while remaining its founding chairman and editor-in-chief. His son Ankoor Purie took over the running of Thomson Press. In 2025, speaking at the FICCI Frames conference, Purie warned that artificial intelligence posed an existential threat to the creation of credible journalism.

Legacy

Purie changed Indian journalism by running a newsroom the way an accountant runs an audit: every fact checked, every sentence weighed, nothing left unaccounted for. His staff gave the standard a nickname, Purification. He pushed reporters to write for the average Indian reader, with clarity above all, and he built his magazine around the idea that news should be reported fully and fairly rather than shouted.

The institutions he built have outlasted his day-to-day leadership. India Today remains a leading news magazine, Aaj Tak remains India's leading Hindi news channel, and the group his family runs still carries the standards he set. For a boy born in Lahore in 1944, who trained as an accountant and never planned to be a journalist, it is a remarkable record: one fortnightly magazine, started in the darkest year for Indian press freedom, became the foundation of the country's most diversified media group.

Purie has said of his own career, "I have done my job as a journalist the best way I could. Fortunately, I love news and I love journalism."