For the last few months, the spotlight has been on India’s top three Hindi general entertainment channels Star Plus, Colors and Zee playing musical chairs for the number one slot. Colors was the leader last week only to be overthrown by Star Plus in Week 28. In its pre-occupation with the intriguing leadership battle, the media industry seems to have ignored the one player which has quietly inched its way up the GRP charts. NDTV Imagine, which toppled Sony some time back to settle down as the number four player in the Hindi GEC category, has improved its viewership further in the last couple of weeks thanks to “item girl” Rakhi Sawant’s reality show Rakhi Ka Swyamvar.

Rakhi Ka Swyamvar – where she is supposed to choose her life-partner — opened with a TRP of 3 plus which is creditable in today’s fragmented cable and satellite TV market. And even though its popularity dipped subsequently, the show still managed an average weekly TRP of 2.3, according to TAM’s latest data. The channel executives are clearly not complaining. The buzz that Rakhi’s show created, drew new viewers to NDTV Imagine, boosting its reach by 20 per cent. Reach, in television viewership measurement jargon, is the percentage of people of a particular universe (in this case the Hindi Speaking Market) who have viewed the channel for at least a minute.

This additional reach (which is now 48 per cent and still low compared to 64 per cent for Colors and 60 per cent for Star Plus) will benefit its other shows, the channel executives feel.

The good news is that other than reality TV, the channel’s fiction shows like Bandini and Jyoti are also working. It usually augurs well for a Hindi GEC when its fiction starts delivering since nearly 70 per cent of the total TV content in the genre is fiction followed by non-fiction or reality shows and films. Its top two shows Bandini and Jyoti are also delivering an average TRP or 2. In the last five months, the channel has built its GRP from 70 to 126 now. The target is to touch 200 in the next few months, according to a senior NDTV Imagine executive.

It may be an ambitious target, but with another new show called Meera to be launched soon followed by a couple of fresh soaps, the channel is ready to give a spirited fight. And once it grabs the eyeballs, advertisers will follow. Sudha Natarajan, who is the COO of the Lintas Media Group, says that big advertisers look for reach but since they find it expensive to buy all three top channels, they spend on the top two and flank it with the number four or five player.

What’s probably also propping up the channel’s morale is the fact that NBC Universal’s team is currently in India taking an operational review of NDTV Imagine and NDTV Networks in which it had picked a 26 per cent stake for $ 150 million. The buzz is that instead of pulling out of the deal, as it was rumoured earlier, it is ready to back the venture whole-heartedly. And, may even increase its stake.