Mr. Garg assumes the Presidency at a pivotal moment for private radio. The industry, which reaches more than 200 million listeners every week as a free, trusted and deeply vernacular medium, is seeking decisive policy action on four fronts: permission to broadcast independent news and current affairs to ensure parity with other media; extension of Phase III licences on the 4% Adjusted Gross Revenue model already approved by the Union Cabinet for new cities; rationalisation of GST on radio from 18% to 5%, at par with print; and conversion of the 2023 MEITY advisory into a mandatory directive activating FM receiver chips in every mobile phone sold in India.
Mr. Garg is a Cost and Management Accountant (ICMA) by training and a graduate of the University of Delhi. He brings close to thirty years of financial and business leadership, of which more than two decades have been in radio. He began his career in corporate finance with Oberoi Hotels & Resorts, moved into broadcasting as Chief Financial Officer of Red FM, and joined the Dainik Bhaskar Group’s radio business in 2007.
He currently serves as CFO for the Group’s radio and some other businesses and has been closely associated with MY FM’s expansion from a regional network into one of the country’s largest FM footprints, now moving towards 44 stations across Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Punjab and Chandigarh.
Within the industry, Mr. Garg is regarded as one of radio’s most respected voices on the economics of the business, including licence fees, spectrum costs, tax structures and the unit economics of small-town broadcasting. He has also contributed to AROI’s submissions to the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.
On his election, Mr. Vijay Garg said, “I am deeply honoured by the confidence the industry has placed in me. Radio is India’s most local, most inclusive and most cost-efficient mass medium — it speaks to the country in its own languages, free of cost, and it stays on air when every other network goes down. Yet the sector today carries a cost structure built for a very different era. My focus as President will be simple and unrelenting: secure media parity for radio, make the economics of the licence sustainable, correct the tax anomaly, and get FM chips switched on in every phone sold in this country. If we get these right, radio will not merely survive — it will power the local economies of Tier 2 and Tier 3 India for the next decade.”
Appreciating his predecessor’s leadership, Mr. Garg said that Ms. Anurradha Prasad’s tenure had “given the industry a united voice and put radio’s case squarely before the Government,” and said the incoming leadership would build on that foundation.
The Association of Radio Operators for India (AROI) is the official body representing private commercial FM radio broadcasters across the country. Its members operate hundreds of stations spanning metros and Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, reaching over 200 million listeners every week in more than a dozen languages. AROI engages with the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, TRAI and other authorities on policy, regulation and the long-term growth of the radio and audio industry in India.
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