Vijay Kumar Chopra of Punjab Kesari Group elected PTI Chairman

New Delhi, September 6

Vijay Kumar Chopra, Chief Editor of the Punjab Kesari Group of newspapers, was on Friday unanimously elected Chairman of Press Trust of India (PTI), the country’s premier news agency.

Chopra, 87, succeeds N Ravi, publisher and former Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu.

Vineet Jain, Managing Director of Bennett, Coleman and Company Limited (BCCL), the publisher of Times of India, was elected Vice-Chairman.

The elections took place at a meeting of the Board of Directors of the news agency following the company’s 71^st annual general meeting here.

Chopra was earlier Chairman of PTI in 2001-02 and 2009-10. He was also past President of the Indian Newspaper Society (INS).

The newspapers of the Punjab Kesari Group have won numerous national awards for excellence in printing from the Government of India and All India Federation of Master Printers, including the award for best printing at the 5^th World Print Congress, 1993.

A Padma Shri recipient, Chopra is a winner of several awards, including the Munshi Prem Chand award in 1991 for fearless and impartial journalism. His name was also entered in the Limca Book of Records in 1997 as the writer of the longest travelogue.

Chopra had created history by running a Rotary Web Offset Press with the help of a tractor in 1974 when the supply of electricity was cut off by the Punjab government for political reasons.

Besides Chopra, Jain and Ravi, the PTI Board members are Viveck Goenka (Express Group), Mahendra Mohan Gupta (Dainik Jagran), K N Shanth Kumar (Deccan Herald), Riyad Mathew (Malayala Manorama), Aveek Kumar Sarkar (Anandabazar Patrika),  M P Veerendra Kumar (Mathrubhumi), R Lakshmipathy (Dinamalar), Hormusji N Cama (Bombay Samachar), Praveen Someshwar (Hindustan Times), Justice R C Lahoti, Deepak Nayyar, Shyam Saran and J F Pochkhanawalla. PTI