Rescue publishing from government control: Varghese

B. G. Verghese, author and journalist, underlined the need to rescue publishing from Government control and urged publishers “to tap the enormous market in Indian languages for profit and education to society.”

Speaking at the FICCI conference on the business of publishing, ‘‘PubliCon-2011’, Verghese said, “India can aspire to be a publishing hub of the world if it can market itself as a producer of books of all kinds.”

The Government’s policy has been a severe handicap to publishing, particularly for Indian languages. For instance, the Government has done nothing to encourage publishing of dictionaries from one Indian vernacular to another, most state translation bureaus are defunct and there is no attempt to bringing out maps of different states and districts of the country.

Furthermore, Verghese declared that while books published overseas were available in India, books from India were not to be found in international markets. “There is a huge market waiting to be tapped outside India, not just for the Indian diaspora, but for foreigners as well. The Government needs to look at this one-way traffic seriously and facilitate export of Indian books to overseas markets.” This he said, would impart a certain richness to international as well as India’s society and at the same time project India’s soft power.

He lamented that there were no books on Kashmir, detailing the origins of the Kashmir problem and wondered why the Indian publishing industry had not come out with such a book. In the absence of historical and contemporary information on Kashmir, “there is today an enormous amount of mythology about the State, there are fairy tales and worse, complete nonsense.”

Verghese cautioned publishers against making the mistake of grabbing the big margin in pricing of books and advised them to go for small margins to effect volume sales. This would boost their bottom lines in the longer run and benefit society by making books available to them cheaply.