The Sahara India Parivar on Thursday announced the launch of a 24-hour national Hindi news channel, Sahara Samay, from Friday, along with 31 city-centric regional Hindi news channels in phases.

"The test run of Sahara Samay news channels has been on for the last two weeks. We will formally launch Sahara Samay on March 28," Sumit Roy, head, Sahara Media and Entertainment, said in a company release.

Arup Ghosh will head the Sahara Samay national news channel. A team led by Vinod Dua, Arup Ghosh, Prabhat Dabral, Rajiv Bajaj, Shireen and Sudhir Chaudhary will support over 1,000 journalists using 50 main news bureaus for all the news channels.

"The company will initially launch one national news channel and one regional news channel, Sahara Samay Uttar Pradesh, and within four months it aims to cover all the planned 31 cities," Sumit Roy added. Lucknow, Kanpur, Agra, Varanasi, Gorakhpur and Dehradun will be covered in the first phase.

The channels will give maximum possible coverage to the local news on a round the clock basis. All the news channels will be free to air digital satellite channel, the company release said.

Besides these news channels, the company has designs on other media platforms too. In print media, it plans to publish a 48-page, newspaper size, Hindi weekly magazine, Sahara Samay, with one national edition and 30 city editions.

Sahara Time, a weekly magazine in English and Aalmi Sahara, an international Urdu magazine, will also be launched by the group.

It will also be on the radio waves with Sahara Swar, satellite radio channel on Mumbai suburban trains, offering entertainment and news.

With these initiatives, the group aims at becoming the largest media and entertainment network in the country, the company release said. Sahara group already has presence in television with Hindi entertainment channel, Sahara TV, and in newspapers through Rashtriya Sahara.

Sahara India has an asset base of over Rs 32,000 crore (Rs 320 billion) and has presence in public deposit mobilisation, housing, aviation and consumer products.