The delta village of Pedaparupudi, in what was then the Krishna district of the Madras Presidency, was farming country: flat, canal-fed paddy land where the seasons were measured by sowing and harvest. It was there, on 16 November 1936, that Cherukuri Ramoji Rao was born into an agricultural family. Nothing about that beginning suggested that he would go on to build one of the largest media houses in India, publish the newspaper that would define Telugu journalism for half a century, and construct a film studio so vast that it entered the record books. Yet he never disowned the delta. The concerns of the farmer, the small saver and the ordinary reader ran through almost everything he built.

From Chit Funds to Newsprint

Ramoji Rao's first substantial venture had nothing to do with journalism. In the early 1960s he started a chit-fund business, Margadarsi, which grew into one of the best-known savings institutions in the Telugu-speaking states. Around the same period he launched an agricultural magazine aimed squarely at cultivators, offering practical guidance on crops, prices and techniques rather than general interest reading. This combination, a financial service for people with small incomes and a publication written for working farmers, revealed the instinct that would guide the rest of his career: identify a large audience that established businesses considered unglamorous, and serve it seriously.

The decisive step came in 1974, when he founded the Telugu daily Eenadu in Visakhapatnam. The newspaper began modestly in a single coastal city, but Ramoji Rao's editorial and commercial approach transformed the market. He built a network of district editions so that readers in provincial towns and villages found their own local news, their own courts, their own schools and their own crop prices in print, rather than a paper edited entirely for the state capital. He invested in distribution so that copies reached small towns early in the morning. He priced the paper for ordinary households. Within a few years Eenadu had become the dominant Telugu daily and a template that other Indian language newspapers studied and copied.

The paper also acquired political weight. It took strong editorial positions, campaigned on issues it considered important, and became a force that governments in the state had to reckon with. Ramoji Rao himself was known for a plain, austere personal style, working long hours and taking a close interest in the details of his publications long after he could have delegated them.

An Expanding Group

Around the newspaper he assembled the Ramoji Group, a conglomerate of unusual breadth. There were magazines in Telugu covering literature, women's writing and cinema. There was Priya Foods, whose pickles and packaged foods became a household name in Telugu kitchens and in the Telugu diaspora abroad. There was a chain of hotels, a retail venture selling handloom textiles and handicrafts, printing operations, and later an over-the-top streaming service. He also moved into television. In 1995 he launched the ETV network, which grew from a single Telugu channel into a family of channels broadcasting in several Indian languages and reaching audiences well beyond the south.

Film production formed another arm. Through Usha Kiran Movies and its associated banners he produced upwards of fifty features over three decades, and unusually for a Telugu producer he worked across Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Bengali and Malayalam as well. His productions tended to favour strong stories over spectacle. Mayuri, released in 1985, told the story of a dancer who returns to performance after losing a leg. Pratighatana, from the same year, dealt with a schoolteacher's confrontation with a violent local politician. Nuvve Kavali, released in 2000, was a modest romance that became both a commercial success and a critical one, winning the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Telugu. Over his career his films collected several Filmfare Awards South and Nandi Awards, and in 2004 he received a Filmfare lifetime achievement award.

Ramoji Film City

His most visible creation opened on the outskirts of Hyderabad in 1996. Ramoji Film City was conceived not as a single studio but as a complete production township, with sound stages, permanent outdoor sets, gardens, hotels and post-production facilities, so that a film could be shot, finished and delivered without leaving the premises. Guinness World Records recognised it as the largest film production facility in the world. It became a working studio for productions in many languages and, almost incidentally, one of the most visited tourist attractions in the region, drawing families who came to walk through the sets.

Recognition and Last Years

In 2016 the Government of India conferred on him the Padma Vibhushan, the second-highest civilian honour, in recognition of his contribution to journalism, literature and education. He had married Rama Devi in 1961; the couple's younger son, Suman, died of leukaemia in 2012, a loss he felt deeply. Ramoji Rao continued to be closely involved with his group into his late eighties.

He died in Hyderabad on 8 June 2024 at the age of eighty-seven, following heart disease. He was cremated the next day at Ramoji Film City, the place he had built, with state honours. Tributes came from across the political spectrum and from the film and news industries he had shaped.

What he left behind is more than a set of companies. He demonstrated that a regional-language newspaper could be a great commercial and civic institution; that a rural readership was worth writing for properly; and that an enterprise begun by a farmer's son from Pedaparupudi could set standards for an entire national industry.