S K Khurana
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ffering solutions to any problems or requirements directly in perfect indigenous manner can generally ensure better outputs altogether. Obviously, if a country has adequately competent options to serve the need of a specific industry and even the whole world recognizes its strengths in that area and hires its expertise and resources, then why not it should come forward vigorously to effectively fulfill the demand of domestic customers equally.
Unequivocally, in the present phenomenon of ‘structural shift’ in the newspaper industry witnessing multi-channel news publishing has made software solutions rather important for every publishers to meet diversified requirements of news dissemination and managing workflow in newspaper production. Resultantly, every newspaper establishment of average or huge strengths is opting efficient and sophisticated software solutions. To cater this segments various international players such as ABB, OneVision, ppi Media, WoodWing Software, etc are endeavouring to come up with customized software solutions for newspapers worldwide and India as well.
With a reputation of an IT superpower, India has many entrepreneurs in the area of software and services: as on March 31, 2009, as much as 8,455 units were operative out of which 7,214 units have exported software in FY 2008-09, marking rise in overall software exports from Rs 180,155 crore in 2007-08 to Rs 207,357 crore in 2008-09, with a YOY growth of 15.01 percent. Despite this explicit strength, overseas organizations come to Indian newspaper houses to study their requirements and difficulties in operation and try to provide them customized solutions, may be by hiring Indian talents for developing such solutions. Of course, the understanding they develop with users and their state-of-the-art solutions prove to be sophisticated and highly efficient but lot of small newspapers cannot afford the cost to be incurred upon.
But if Indian IT firms come forward for effectively contributing to the country’s newspaper industry by providing indigenously developed software solutions, the enormous development could be brought within the industry. Their solutions would prove not only economical but also quite effective for Indian newspapers as domestic IT firms closely understand operational difficulties of the workforce at the country’s newspaper houses. The overall benefits in terms of man hour savings, error free workflows, waste controls, quick response rate and circulation control procedures in larger perspective can be achieved. Some companies like 4Cplus, Ninestars, Pressmart, Summit Information Technologies, etc have already been doing really a good job in this perspective, but more are needed to step forward, potentials look immense!
