he began collaborating with the Oxford political scientist David Butler and Indian economist Ashok Lahiri in an effort to mainstream the field of psephology in India. The collaboration produced three book and Roy became an election analysts for the India Today magazine. For the 1984 Indian general election, Roy produced an extremely accurate election forecast which predicted an Indian National Congress victory with 400 seats. The prediction earned him the reputation of being the most successful psephologist in India. Roy is credited for pioneering opinion polling in India between 1980 and 1995. New Delhi Television Ltd (NDTV) was founded in 1984 as a production firm for international news broadcasters and the public service broadcaster Doordarshan. Radhika and Prannoy Roy are considered to be the co-founders of the company, however Prannoy states that Radhika was the original founder as he joined the company later. Radhika Roy was working as a journalist at The Indian Express and then at the India Today magazine before becoming the founder of NDTV. Doordarshan was initially wary of allowing private production houses to cover domestic news, and NDTV was contracted to produce a weekly international news programme called The World This Week for the public broadcaster. The weekly was instant success among its Indian audience and attained one of the highest viewerships on Doordarshan. Prannoy Roy in the meantime worked as an associate professor for an year in 1985 at the Delhi School of Economics. In 1986–1987 he was hired in a team of economists to build a macro-econometric model of India for the Ministry of Finance, the model is the largest of its kind. Doordarshan eventually contracted NDTV to cover the general election results and budget session specials. The first televised coverage of an election result in India was produced by NDTV for the 1989 Indian general election. Roy began his career as a television journalist by covering the general election for Doordarshan. Following which, he also began appearing as a news presenter in The World This Week programme. Both the election results coverage and the international news show were widely successful. According to Roy, it was not difficult to appear good in comparison to Doordarshan which he described as more radio than television and that the time period was the most "newsiest" in television history. NDTV requested for and received a contract from Doordarshan to produce a daily news bulletin on domestic affairs called