Arza Safiya
New Delhi, Jun 21: Over the years, India has seen a decline in Urdu readership. With journalism having entered a new era of development, newer publications like 'Hamara Hind' are contributing to the revival of Urdu readership in the online market.
Hamara Hind - an Indian news portal that provides news in Urdu is emerging to become an important player amongst multiple Urdu publications that are decades old in age. Hamara Hind reports news and provides a voice to the opinions of the youth of the minority Muslim communities who are engaging with each other and the world through social media platforms and the internet. The website also carries pieces that are expert opinions on global political and social matters concerning the Muslim population. There has also been a constant focus on women-centric news at Hamara Hind.
It was recently revealed that it receives the maximum of its traffic from Pakistan. Out of roughly 6 million visitors that hit the website, 4 million visitors are from Pakistan. The other key contributing countries included India and Bangladesh. The Alexa website – a website analysis tool also showed a higher Alexa Rank (a measure of popularity in-country) in Pakistan as compared to India.
It is to be noted that India and Pakistan are the two largest Urdu speaking nations where Pakistan has more than double Urdu Speakers than India (Pakistan reported roughly 160,000,000 users while India reported only 62,800,000 Urdu speakers). However, when it comes to being the first language, India beats Pakistan by having 50,800,000 people while Pakistan is only at 15,000,000. Maharashtra and Hyderabad contribute significantly to Urdu speakers after Jammu and Kashmir. Other Muslim countries in the world have significantly lower Urdu speakers with Saudi Arabia at 740,000, Qatar at 180,000, and Iran at 89,000.
Considering that Hamara Hind is an online-only news portal with no print presence so far (they do have an E-paper though), it has created a niche amongst the Urdu-speaking communities of the world - which is probably the reason behind the traffic this news website receives. Since Pakistan is the largest Urdu speaker country in the world with smartphone users at 161 million in 2019, it seems natural that maximum traffic is being received from the neighbouring country. However, the same is not true for the other Urdu websites. A mix is observed for others. For example, Etemaad Daily reports a higher Alexa rank in India than in other countries, 24urdu.com again has a superior Alexa rank in Pakistan.
There was news of Hamara Hind launching a print publication, but the newspaper market has not yet witnessed Hamara Hind in their hands as a print publication. Covid-19 and lockdown are the predicted reasons for the delay in launching print. With a team of 18 journalists, Hamara Hind seems to be putting up a strong front to capture the emerging market of online Urdu speakers. The print newspapers, particularly in the Urdu market are struggling to keep up with the decline in the number of readers and should soon adapt to such online models to take some market share back.