MAM
Viral goes viral at National Payments Corp RuPay unit
BENGALURU: The National Payments Corp of India (NPCI) has landed Viral Maru as its new head of RuPay, betting that her decade-long streak of making plastic fantastic will turbocharge India’s homegrown card network. Maru’s mandate? Transform RuPay from plucky underdog into a credit, digital and tokenised payments juggernaut that can slug it out with the Visa-Mastercard duopoly.
It’s a hire that makes sense. Maru has spent the better part of ten years making Indians swipe, tap and spend. Most recently, as vice-president and head of banking and payments at Fi, she steered the Neobank’s charge into cards and UPI. Before that, she spent five months at Tata Digital as director of strategic initiatives, having already put in two-and-a-half years launching the Tata Neu HDFC Bank credit card—an app-first assault on India’s loyalty ecosystem.
But it’s her nearly six-year stint at HDFC Bank that really sharpened her chops. As vertical head of digital acquisitions and innovation, she doubled online-sourced cards year-on-year, moved 80 per cent of physical sales to digitally assisted channels, and built API stacks that made card onboarding almost frictionless. She also championed tokenisation on Google Pay and Jio Pay, and launched instant card issuance—the sort of stuff that makes fintech types go weak at the knees.
Earlier, as product and portfolio head for Diners Club consumer cards at HDFC, she doubled acceptance coverage across India and dreamt up a self-sustaining 10X rewards programme that turned Diners into the card of choice for the swish set. She even put real-time lounge usage displays on point-of-sale terminals—an industry first that made airport lounges slightly less of a scrum.
Her career started at Axis Bank, where she launched online remittance platforms for the UAE, America, Britain, Singapore and Canada, and grew NRI accounts by 50 per cent year-on-year. A stint at Citibank India polished her acquisition and brand-building skills before she entered the big leagues.
Now, with NPCI’s backing and India’s digital payments infrastructure maturing at breakneck speed, Maru has her work cut out. RuPay may already be ubiquitous at petrol pumps and kirana shops, but cracking premium cards and credit is another game entirely. If anyone can make it happen, though, it’s someone whose career has quite literally gone viral.
Digital
Content India 2026 opens with a copro pitch, a spice evangelist and a £10,000 prize for Indian storytelling
Dish TV and C21Media’s three-day summit puts seven ambitious projects before an international jury, and two walk away with serious development money
MUMBAI: India’s content industry gathered in Mumbai this March for Content India 2026, a three-day summit organised by Dish TV in partnership with C21Media, and it wasted no time making a statement. The event opened with a Copro Pitch that put seven scripted and unscripted television concepts before an international panel of judges, and by the end of it, two projects had walked away with £10,000 each in marketing prize money from C21Media to support development and international promotion.
The jury, comprising Frank Spotnitz, Fiona Campbell, Rashmi Bajpai, Bal Samra and Rachel Glaister, evaluated a shortlist that ranged from a dark Mumbai comedy-drama about mental health (Dirty Minds, created by Sundar Aaron) to a Delhi coming-of-age mystery (Djinn Patrol, by Neha Sharma and Kilian Irwin), a techno-thriller about a teenage gaming prodigy (Kanpur X Satori, by Suchita Bhatia), an investigative crime drama blending mythology and modern thriller (The Age of Kali, by Shivani Bhatija), a documentary on India’s spice heritage (The Masala Quest, hosted by Sarina Kamini), a documentary on competitive gaming (Respawn: India’s Esports Revolution, by George Mangala Thomas and Sangram Mawari), and a reality-horror competition merging gaming and immersive fear (Scary Goose, by Samar Iqbal).
The session was hosted by Mayank Shekhar.
The two winners were Djinn Patrol, backed by Miura Kite, formerly of Participant Media and known for Chinatown and Keep Sweet: Pray & Obey, with Jaya Entertainment, producers of Real Kashmir Football Club, also attached; and The Masala Quest, created and hosted by Sarina Kamini, an Indian-Australian cook, author and self-described “spice evangelist.”
The summit also unveiled the Content India Trends Report, whose findings made for bracing reading. Daoud Jackson, senior analyst at OMDIA, set the tone: “By 2030, online video in India will nearly double the revenue of traditional TV, becoming the main driver of growth.” He noted that in 2025, India produced a quarter of all YouTube videos globally, overtaking the United States, while Indians collectively spend 117 years daily on YouTube and 72 years on Instagram. Traditional subscription TV is declining as free TV and connected TV gain ground, forcing broadcasters to innovate. “AI-generated content is just 2 per cent of engagement,” Jackson added, “highlighting the dominance of high-quality human content. The key for Indian media companies is scaling while monetising effectively from day one.”
Hannah Walsh, principal analyst at Ampere Analysis, added hard numbers to the picture. India produced over 24,000 titles in January 2026 alone, with 19,000 available internationally. The country now accounts for 12 per cent of Asia-Pacific content spend, up from 8 per cent in 2021, outpacing both Japan and China. Key exporters include JioStar, Zee Entertainment, Sony India, Amazon and Netflix, delivering over 7,500 Indian-produced titles abroad each year. The top importing markets are Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, the United States and the Philippines. Scripted content dominates globally at 88 per cent, with crime dramas and children’s and family titles performing particularly strongly.
Manoj Dobhal, chief executive and executive director of Dish TV India, framed the summit’s ambition squarely. “Stories don’t need translation. They need a platform, discovery, and reach, local or global,” he said. “India produces more movies than any country, our streaming platforms compete globally, and our tech and creators win international awards. Yet fragmentation slows growth. Producers, platforms, and tech move in different lanes. We need shared spaces, collaboration, and an ecosystem where ideas, technology, and people meet. That is why we built Content India.”
The data, the pitches and the prize money all pointed to the same conclusion: India is not waiting for the world to discover its stories. It is building the infrastructure to sell them.
