REWATIRAMAN Shukla, a young office worker living in a New Delhi slum, can't remember a time his family did not have a newspaper delivered. Even when home was a single room in a congested tenement without plumbing. Even when his father worked long hours as the single breadwinner to provide bare necessities.
THE newspaper was what Shukla's father believed would open the world of opportunity for his three children. And now, families like his are firing the exceptional growth of regional newspapers in India.
At a time when scores of Western newspapers have downsized or shifted to online editions, the Indian newspaper industry is booming. Media analysts say the regional language newspapers are expected to clock double-digit figures in the coming decade as millions of new literates choose papers as their primary source of information."Newspapers, especially in the regional languages, are a fast-growing space in India right now. We are bang in the middle of it, so we are very excited," said Pradeep Dwivedi of Dainik Bhaskar, or Daily Sun, the most popular Hindi newspaper in the country, with about 3.57 million copies sold each day.Democratic India has a long history of print news; the first paper was founded more than 230 years ago. The government's Registrar of Newspapers in India lists more than 82,000 publications. Nearly 33,000 of these are in Hindi, the language spoken by 41 per cent of India's 1.2 billion people. Thousands of others are in India's many regional languages, and many of those also have circulations in the millions. Readership is even greater, as a single copy of a newspaper is often shared by numerous people.Overall, regional newspapers will grow 12 to 14 per cent annually for the next several years, according to estimates by consulting firm KPMG India.Media experts said the newspaper boom in the smaller towns is driven by its young and aspirational population. The enormous push for education over the past five decades has bumped up literacy rates, which grew from 65 per cent to 74 per cent in a decade ending in 2011. But there's a long way to go, with the government predicting universal literacy will be achieved only in 2060.The plethora of television news channels in regional languages has surprisingly only increased newspaper readership, said P.N. Vasanti, director of the Centre for Media Studies in New Delhi."We call it the 'appetiser effect'. In a study of media habits of people, we found that the more that people watched television news, the more they were turning to the newspapers to check the facts," she said."In India, the credibility of newspapers and the written word is way beyond that of the television news channels."Rewatiraman's father, Ved Prakash Shukla, has been subscribing to a Hindi newspaper for 15 years for his children's sake, even when tight finances made it something of a luxury."It was tough. My wife would scold me, saying, 'Why are you wasting money on a paper when we don't have money to buy food?"' Shukla said one recent morning as he sat on the stairs outside his tiny home with his paper and morning cup of tea."But I saw the newspaper as an investment in my children's future. In my job as a chauffeur, I saw how the children of the rich speak English and know all about what's happening in the world."Shukla's investment appears to be paying off. Rewatiraman was recently promoted and has begun climbing the corporate ladder with some success."All those years of reading the paper. It's been worth it," Rewatiraman said.Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Aspirations push Indian newspaper boom
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