Hindi
‘Miss Lovely’ bags the top prize at 11th IFFLA Fest in LA
NEW DELHI: Ashim Ahluwalia‘s feature Miss Lovely bagged the Grand Jury Prize while Nitin Kakkar‘s Filmistaan received the top Audience Award at the 11th annual Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA).
Ship of Theseus by Anand Gandhi received Honourable Mention from the Grand Jury for features in the concluding ceremony, which ended with the screening of the Los Angeles premiere of Deepa Mehta‘s Midnight‘s Children based on Salman Rushdie‘s novel.
The short film Tatpaschat by Vasudev Keluskar also won an Honourable Mention from the Grand Jury.
The documentary Beyond All Boundaries by Sushrat Jain and the short film Unravel by Meghna Gupta not only won the best Grand Jury awards in their categories, but also the Audience prizes.
This year, the festival showcased more than 35 film features, documentaries, and short films at ArcLight Hollywood, home of IFFLA since its inception. "The awards are always bittersweet for all of us in the programming team as we truly believe in the exceptional talent and relevance of each film which has been so carefully chosen," said lead programmer Terrie Samundra. "That being said, we wholeheartedly share the enthusiasm of the audience and our prestigious jury. A huge congratulations to the winners!"
The 2013 feature film jurors were International Director of the Feature Film Programme at the Sundance Institute Paul Federbush, director/editor/writer Kanika Myer (Halo, Heart of India), and assistant curator of Film Programmes at Los Angeles County Museum of Art Bernardo Rondeau.
The Best Documentary Award was decided by The Hollywood Reporter and Los Angeles Times film critic Sheri Linden, Senior Programmer at Film Independent Maggie Mackay, and Producer Nadine Mundo (Chelsea Settles).
Judging the short films were filmmaker and IFFLA alumni Prashant Bhargava (Patang), film curator and director of Industry Programming at Palm Springs ShortFest Kathleen McInnis, and actress Sheetal Sheth (ABCD, Looking for comedy in the Muslim World).
Miss Lovely, described as the "most hard-hitting film in the festival" by feature jury spokesperson Rondeau, is the story of two brothers caught in the grimy world of sub-Bollywood soft porn in the 1980s.
Beyond All Boundaries follows three cricket players from poor backgrounds whose love of the game becomes a microcosm of India‘s national obsession with the British import.
Filmistan is the story of a Hindu man, accidentally taken prisoner in Pakistan, who forms a bond with his captors based on a shared love for Bollywood music dramas.
Christina Marouda, who founded this festival eleven years earlier and is now working as director of development at New York‘s Museum of the Moving Image, also credited the mentorship of older independent stalwarts such as director Anurag Kashyap, whose gangster drama Gangs of Wasseypur opened the festival last week, and supportive producer Guneet Monga, honoured this year along with cable television executive Bela Balaria at the Festival‘s Sixth Annual Industry Leadership Awards.
In addition to the many independent films on view, the festival this year also screened the blockbuster Tamil-language fantasy film Eega and the animated adventure Arjun the Great, a co-production between India‘s UTV and The Walt Disney Co.
Although the festival has become an essential stop for producers and directors of challenging personal films, one of its most popular features always has been the "Bollywood by Night" sidebar, an ongoing tribute to mainstream Hindi music dramas. This year, "Bollywood by Night" was a five-film tribute to the late producer director Yash Chopra, who died in 2012.
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.
