Aashish Mehra promoted to deputy general manager at Saregama India

MUMBAI: Film production credits rarely tell the whole story of what someone actually built, and Aashish Mehra’s promotion to deputy general manager at Saregama India is a useful reminder of that. On paper, this reads as a routine internal elevation. In practice, it recognises a five-year run in which Mehra quietly expanded his own job description from producing films to building an entirely new revenue line for the company.

Mehra joined Saregama in 2021 as head of production and executive producer, a role centred on the conventional business of film production, content acquisition and IP development. What sets his tenure apart is what came next. Rather than staying confined to the studio floor, he pushed into live entertainment, particularly devotional content, an area most media companies treat as a footnote rather than a growth vertical. Under his stewardship, that bet paid off, with live devotional experiences reaching tens of thousands of audiences across India, a scale that turns a niche cultural offering into a genuine commercial category.

That expansion earned him the business head and executive producer title earlier this year, and within seven months, the deputy general manager designation. Promotions arriving that quickly inside a listed entertainment company are rarely handed out on sentiment alone. They tend to follow revenue, and Saregama, a company whose core music licensing business has increasingly been supplemented by film, OTT and live experiences, appears to have found in Mehra someone who can build all three simultaneously.

His path here is worth noting for what it reveals about how production careers in Indian entertainment actually compound. Mehra spent nearly two decades moving through Cinevistaas, Star India, Essel Vision, Contiloe Entertainment and Zee Studios Originals before founding his own production house, Happy People Productions, in 2020. Along the way he worked with filmmakers including Ravi Chopra, Anand L. Rai and Ram Gopal Varma, a spread of collaborators wide enough to suggest genuine range rather than a single genre specialism. That breadth, television, film, events and now devotional live experiences, is precisely the kind of generalist production expertise that large entertainment houses increasingly need as content businesses diversify beyond any single format.

The bigger story here is Saregama’s own trajectory. A company built on music catalogues has been steadily building out adjacent businesses in film and live entertainment, and Mehra’s rise through the ranks tracks that diversification almost exactly. If devotional live content continues to scale the way it has under his watch, Saregama will have a genuine case study in turning a legacy music business into a full-spectrum entertainment company, and Mehra will have been the one holding the blueprint.