The first multi-lingual news agency of India was

Concept

A news agency (wire service) is an organisation that gathers news centrally and sells it to subscribing newspapers, radio and television stations rather than to readers directly. Wire services are classified by the language range of the copy they transmit: a single-language agency files its despatches in one language only, while a multi-lingual agency files the same despatch simultaneously in two or more languages.

So a "first of its kind" claim about a multi-lingual agency is settled on two axes read together — the year the service began operating, and the number of languages it filed in. Neither axis alone decides it: an older agency that filed in one language does not qualify, and a many-language agency that started later is not the first.

Applying the two axes to the agencies named here

Reading the two axes together, the earliest service that carried the same news in more than one language is Hindustan Samachar (also spelt Hindusthan Samachar), founded by Dadasaheb S. S. Apte on 10 April 1948, which supplied news copy in ten Indian languages. It is therefore India’s first multi-lingual news agency.

Cross-check against the other agencies

• The Associated Press of India is the oldest name in the list, but it was a Reuters-run English wire service; a single-language service cannot meet the "multi-lingual" condition however early it started.

• Samachar Bharati did file in more than one language (English and Hindi), but it began distributing news only in 1967, nineteen years after 1948.

• Samachar was multi-lingual as well (English, Hindi and Marathi), yet it came into being on 1 February 1976 by amalgamating the four wire services then in the field — Hindustan Samachar among them — so it cannot pre-date its own constituent.

Answer: Hindustan Samachar. The item is from UGC NET Paper I, December 2013, and the UGC official answer key records the same option.