MAM
Covid Care: JCB India to support education of children of deceased employees
New Delhi: JCB India has decided to support the education of the children of its employees who succumbed to Covid-19 and extend medical insurance for their families to ten years.
“Besides, the term insurance policy benefits, the company will support the education of the children of deceased employees to the tune of Rs one lakh per child, per year for their schooling and Rs two lakh per child, per year for three years for their graduation. For contractual employees, there will be one-time support of Rs 3 lakh,” JCB India said in a statement.
“The past few weeks have been a phase of intense learning. Virtually all our organisational resources were deployed towards supporting the health and safety of our employees and their families. Unfortunately, we also went through the painful phase of losing some of our colleagues to the virus,” said JCB India CEO and MD Deepak Shetty, highlighting that the company is fully committed to supporting the families.
The company is also conducting special vaccination drives for its employees and has already inoculated over 2,000 employees and their families in Ballabgarh, Pune and Jaipur facilities.
On 30 April, JCB India had to temporarily pause all manufacturing operations for ten days to stop the spread of the virus, which had taken a toll on workers across different facilities. Other manufacturers like Tata Motors, Maruti Suzuki, Honda also had to close down their manufacturing facilities during the second wave
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Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
