2021 has been a tremendously challenging year for all of us in business: Avinash Pandey

News operations, included in the essential services, continued in all earnest amid the raging pandemic across the country. Journalists become the frontline warriors as they reported from Ground Zero at great risks to their lives. Speaking at the launch of the 4^th edition of Adgully’s e-book, Powerful Influencers 2021, yesterday (December 23, 2021), Avinash Pandey, CEO, ABP Network, recounted how the news network functioned through the tough challenges, the steps taken to protect its staff as well as their family members from COVID infection, and the important role of influencers in the digital era.

Commencing his address, Avinash Pandey noted the impact of influencers and said that it is not just something that the society is talking about, but also having a deep influence on changing people’s attitude and those of businesses.

Speaking about how the ABP Network carried out its operations amid the pandemic times, Pandey candidly admitted that “2021 has been a tremendously challenging year for all of us in business. When we began the year, we thought we were done with the pandemic. At ABP Network, we were about to embark on a journey which we had envisaged about a year ago during the course of the pandemic itself in 2020. We saw a full challenge going ahead as to what to do, when in the first week of April the pandemic hit its hardest.”

Pandey added that it was the time when the Network was geared to launch its first digital venture in the South – ABP Nadu. “Now imagine the situation, where we were all geared up to start a digital offering in Tamil language, in a state where ABP had not been before, we had done full preparation. But it was such a hard hit of the pandemic that we had to pause and first think about how to save ourselves and our employees from this pandemic,” he said.

He further noted, “Influence is something that you can make in a society by doing a small bit every day. Swami Vivekananda has rightly said that good people and good things do not happen in a single day. Any person having no merit can actually achieve a lot in a single day by just being lucky. But being consistent doing small things and being thoughtful, being kind and realising which situation you are in, doing bit by bit to help others achieve their goals is what a great influencer does.”

Elaborating on how ABP tackled the second wave of COVID, Pandey said, “At ABP Network, we decided that we will pause all the activities and focus on saving lives of people who are working with us, their families and everybody around them. We made a policy that no one is safe until everyone is safe. During the course of the pandemic, can you imagine when our work is such that not much can be achieved if you are just sitting at home, a large number of people have to come to the office to make sure that the show goes on air and the reporters are on the ground. All of us were exposing ourselves to the virus. Every single employee during the course of the next few months became sick. There was a time when running the PCR required about eight people, but we were functioning with just two persons. While people were scared, they knew that this was the call of duty.”

Amid such challenges, the Network managed to tide over time and ensured that every single person in the company, their family members, and their near and dear ones were vaccinated. He thanked the News Broadcasters Association, the Yogi Government in Uttar Pradesh and other state governments as well as the Central Government for the vaccination drive.

During the same time, the Network carried out its frenetic preparations to launch ABP Nadu. The digital offering has streaming videos, texts, news, etc.

Here, Pandey mentioned that the ABP Network was the first one to report about the sad helicopter crash that killed several senior defence personnel, including CDS General Bipin Rawat.