India is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the south-west, and the Bay of Bengal on the south-east. Media of India consist of several different types of Indian communications media: television, radio, cinema, newspapers, magazines, and Internet-based Web sites.
India has more than 70,000 newspapers and over 690 satellite channels (more than 80 are news channels) and is the biggest newspaper market in the world - over 100 million copies sold each day. The first major newspaper in India—The Bengal Gazette—was started in 1780 under the British Raj by James Augustus Hickey. Other newspapers such as The India Gazette, The Calcutta Gazette, The Madras Courier , The Bombay Herald etc. soon followed. These newspapers carried news of the areas under the British rule. The Bombay Samachar, founded in 1822 and printed in Gujarati is the oldest newspaper in Asia still in print. The Times of India was founded in 1838 as The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce by Bennett, Coleman and Company, a colonial enterprise now owned by an Indian conglomerate. In the 1950s 214 daily newspapers were published in the country. Out of these, 44 were English language dailies while the rest were published in various regional and national languages. The total number of newspapers published in the country reached 35,595 newspapers by 1993 (3,805 dailies). India consumed 99 million newspaper copies as of 2007—making it the second largest market in the world for newspapers.