Focus
Hindi daily Hindustan starts
modernisation journey in Bihar and Jharkhand
To deliver appealing quality product, facility upgradation is a constant process at HT Media. Recently, with the launch of a state-of-the-art printing plant at Patna, which was inaugurated by the chief minister of Bihar Nitish Kumar, Hindi daily Hindustan has commenced the modernisation journey of its facilities across Bihar and Jharkhand.
T
he two flagship products of the HT Media group, Hindustan Times and Hindustan are the undisputed market leaders in Bihar and Jharkhand with a seventy to eighty percent market share in readership and revenues for more than two decades. Hindustan prints multiple editions from Patna, Muzaffarpur, Bhagalpur, Ranchi, Dhanbad, and Jamshedpur in Bihar and Jharkhand region. To provide the right focus to a very successful and re-launched product, HT Media has hived-off the Hindi business into a separate entity, which is called the Hindustan Media Ventures Ltd. Hindustan is now a reader friendly product with emphasis on local news coverage, lots of colours and high quality content, and is emerging into a popular offering for people across the Hindi belt with editions in Delhi, Lucknow, Dehradun, Kanpur, Meerut, Allahabad, Varanasi, Agra, Bareilly, Kolkata and Mohali and the entire Bihar and Jharkhand to print more than twenty lakh copies per day.
Now, the newly developed facility at Danapur in Patna would enable them to cater to the expanding colour requirements of Patna and surrounding areas. Inaugurating the facility, the chief minister of Bihar Nitish Kumar appreciated the positive strides being made by Hindustan and the Hindustan Times, especially the role played by the company to support the growth and development of Bihar during the last three decades. He also took note of the more than a Rs100 crores investment being made by HMVL in modernization and infrastructure development. The inauguration event was attended by the who’s who of Bihar, and the senior management team of HT media besides a large gathering of the intellectuals, journalists and the media.
V Siva Raja, assistant vice president–supply chain, HT Media Ltd, who set up this project stated that the new plant at Danapur is a green field project with huge expandability and designed to take care of the requirements for the next decade. All the other centres in this region are also being upgraded to print 20 to 24 pages in the main section of the editions besides the pullouts. Hindustan, with this up-gradation, will bring in a lot of colour pages across Bihar and Jharkhand as has been done in the rest of the country. Hindustan is the third largest and undoubtedly one of the most respected Hindi daily in the country today.
With a capability to print more than six lakh copies per day, the plant can print 24 pages products with full colour and inserted with a balloon former. The Hiline machine (from Manugraph) has six towers and is fully automatic with remote inking, auto-registration, and CIP 3 capability to transfer the page data for quick colour setting. The plant also has newly reconfigured Newsline 45 machine (from Manugraph), one of the longest Newsline configurations with a capability to print 24 pages, is now commissioned and delivers at the rated speed of 45,000 copies per hour.
The plant is designed to produce copies with very high cost benefit ratios and can use all varieties of newsprint with the infrastructure and economically print low as well as high print order editions to suit the marketing requirements.
Once the plant stabilizes in the productivity, it will use ink saving software as used in other plants of HT and Hindustan.
The facility also has state-of-the-art CtPs (from Agfa and Krause), automated ink pumping and other infrastructure to take care of the production requirements. The plant is now fully operational and delivering printed copies to Patna and surrounding areas.
