Hindi
Sunny Leone fails to grab eyeballs at box office
MUMBAI: It is sex over sermon and Sunny Leone scores over legendary actors Paresh Rawal, Naseeruddin Shah and Annu Kapoor as her first double role film, Ek Paheli Leela, scores over talent packed Dharam Sankat Mein.
Not that Ek Paheli Leela is great shakes. It remained on the lower side on Friday and failed to add to its opening day figures on Saturday. The film ended its first weekend with figures of Rs 11.2 crore mainly on the strength of its performance at single screens.
Dharam Sankat Mein lacked in the pre-release promotion and suffered on this count. The film had a poor opening despite stalwarts like Rawal, Shah and Malik in the cast. The comparison to Rawal’s trendsetting OMG: Oh My God was inevitable and Dharam Sanakat Mein fell short by miles besides the fact that quite a few films on the similar theme have followed OMG. The film gets a poor opening and barely manages to cross the Rs 1 crore-mark on its opening day and hardly improves on Saturday. The film has had a weekend of Rs 5.1 crore.
Barefoot To Goa stays out of contention as far as box office is concerned. Such group funded idealistic films need a commercial approach.
Detective Byomkesh Bakshi, another small film after Dum Laga Ke Haisha from Yash Raj Films, remains average. An indulgent film based on the WW2 era Bengali fictional character, the film falls prey to its mediocre content. It manages to collect Rs 19.97 crore for the first week. The film has added Rs 3.27 for its second weekend to take its two week tally to Rs 23.14 crore.
Barkhaa is a lost cause. The film fails to cross Rs 1 crore mark even after two weeks.
Dum Laga Ke Haisha has collected Rs 35 lakh in its sixth week to take its six week tally to Rs 30.32 crore.
NH10 added Rs 30 lakh in its fourth week to take its four-week total to Rs 30.5 crore.
Far from the days when English films released in India eons after their premiere release in the West, that too at one Metro at a time, Fast & Furious 7, released at multiple screens across India and opened to a bumper response.
The fact that the brand equity had been built over the years helped as did the ensemble star cast. The film collected better than many Hindi super star films in its first week with figures of about Rs 70 crore.
Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s foray into Hollywood cinema with Broken Horses, a rehash of his 1989 Hindi film Parinda, comes a cropper. The film has gone almost unnoticed in Indian cinemas.
Hindi
India’s telecom subscribers cross 1.32 billion in February 2026
Broadband base swells past 1.06 billion as Jio and Airtel tighten grip on the market.
MUMBAI: India’s telecom sector is ringing in steady growth once again adding millions of new connections every month while the race for broadband supremacy continues to heat up like a fiercely contested cricket match. According to the latest data released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on 1 April 2026, the total telephone subscriber base in the country reached 1,321.31 million at the end of February 2026. This marked a net addition of 7.31 million subscribers during the month, translating into a monthly growth rate of 0.56 per cent.
Wireless subscribers (including mobile and Fixed Wireless Access) stood at 1,273.31 million, registering a net addition of 6.97 million and a growth rate of 0.55 per cent. Within this, urban wireless connections grew to 730.75 million (growth 0.70 per cent), while rural wireless subscribers reached 542.56 million (growth 0.35 per cent).
Wireline subscribers, though much smaller in scale, showed slightly faster growth. The total wireline base increased to 47.99 million, with a net addition of 0.34 million and a monthly growth rate of 0.70 per cent. Urban areas continued to dominate wireline connections with a share of 89.41 per cent.
Overall tele-density in India improved to 92.66 per cent. Urban tele-density stood at 150.68 per cent, while rural tele-density edged up to 60.02 per cent.
The broadband subscriber base crossed a significant milestone, reaching 1,059.05 million at the end of February 2026. This reflected a healthy net addition of 6.33 million subscribers and a monthly growth rate of 0.60 per cent from January’s figure of 1,052.72 million.
Segment-wise, mobile wireless access continued to drive the majority of growth with 996.52 million subscribers. Fixed Wireless Access (including 5G FWA) added 16.51 million, while wired broadband stood at 46.02 million.
Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd. maintained its commanding lead with 519.64 million broadband subscribers. Bharti Airtel Ltd. followed with 364.14 million, Vodafone Idea Ltd. with 129.36 million, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. with 28.70 million, and Atria Convergence Technologies Ltd. with 2.38 million.
Together, these top five players command a massive 98.60 per cent share of the total broadband market.
In the wireless (mobile) segment, private operators continued to dominate with 92.59 per cent market share, leaving public sector undertakings (BSNL and MTNL) with just 7.41 per cent.
Out of the total 1,257.29 million wireless (mobile) subscribers, 1,177.60 million were active on the peak Visitor Location Register (VLR) date, representing an impressive 93.66 per cent activity rate. Bharti Airtel led in this metric with 99.42 per cent of its subscribers active.
Meanwhile, 14.47 million subscribers submitted requests for Mobile Number Portability (MNP) in February, indicating healthy competition and customer churn across zones.
While urban areas still lead in absolute numbers, rural connectivity is slowly catching up. Rural wireless tele-density stood at 59.46 per cent, compared with the much higher urban figure of 142.32 per cent.
Fixed Wireless Access using 5G technology also showed promising traction, growing to 11.93 million subscribers. Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel are the primary players driving this segment.
The data paints a picture of a maturing yet still rapidly expanding telecom ecosystem. With total telephone subscribers now well past the 1.32 billion mark and broadband users comfortably above 1.06 billion, India continues to solidify its position as one of the world’s largest and most dynamic digital markets.
From bustling city streets to remote villages, more Indians are staying connected than ever before proving that when it comes to telecom, the country’s appetite for growth shows no signs of hanging up anytime soon.
