A month ago I became aware of disquiet among some Indian publishers that foreign publishers are actively encouraged to move to India by the Indian government. Demands to scrap the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) have fallen on deaf ears. Indian publishers complain they have no support from their own government and foreigners are able to repatriate their profits. Indian publishers find it difficult to raise funds as they are not usually so well established as their foreign competitors and Indian banks are unwilling to accept books as collateral, so expansion is hampered.

Mr Harish Jain, m.d. of Unistar Books, established in Chandigarh for nearly 30 years, explained to me that throughout its history Indian publishing has been largely based on the family firm, so it could never develop the way it has in Europe and the United States, with massive investment. Despite being the largest producer of books, India has failed to make an impact on the world stage. Eminent Indian scholars are largely produced outside India.  Indian publishing has survived by concentrating on producing books for its captive audience of mainly educational books. These, according to Mr Jain, are badly written, edited and shabbily produced, due to demands for the price to be low and the disorganised and fractured state of the market over a continent-sized country with cultural and linguistic differences. It is this area that the foreign businesses are targeting. 

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‘We demand the government scrap the FDI in the business of publishing to give a breathing space to Indian publishers,’ Anand Bhushan, advisor and former chairman of the New Delhi-based Federation of Indian Publishers (FIP), told IANS here.

The government allowed 100 percent FDI in book publishing in 2000. The domestic industry has been seeking a reversal of the policy ever since.

‘Foreign publishers have big capital and full support from their governments. They have badly invaded the Indian market and Indian publishers cannot compete with them,’ he said.

Bhushan, also joint managing director of Pitambar Publishers in New Delhi, said the domestic market was increasing every year but foreign players were eating into their profits in a big way.

Foreign publishers have invested around Rs.200 million (Rs.20 crore/$4 million) in India in the last 10 years and taken away profits worth over Rs.1 billion, he said.

Bhushan was in the city recently to head FIP’s 12th national convention that saw the participation of publishers from across the country.

‘Every year, over 80,000 new books are published in India. Hindi language books constitute the majority as around 25,000 books are in Hindi while about 20,000 books are in English, and the rest are in other vernacular languages,’ he said.

Asked about the threat of e-books, Bhushan said: ‘E-books have stormed into the market and they will certainly create their monopoly one day. But for the next 10 years, we face no threat from them as this technology will take time to make room for itself.’

According to official figures, book exports increased from Rs.800 million in 1998 to Rs.12 billion in 2008.

However, publishers are not impressed with the growth in exports.

‘Despite this huge figure, we stand nowhere in the international market. This figure is just a fraction if we compare it with the number of books exported from countries like the US, Canada, Russia and the UK,’ Harish Jain, owner of 28-year-old city-based Unistar Books Publishers, told IANS.

He said that the situation was not very rosy since ‘banks are not giving us loans as they do not consider books as a security’.

Even the government does not give enough importance to the publishing industry, he said. ‘In countries like Russia, there is a separate ministry of book publishing that takes care of publishers’ interests,’ Jain said.

Ramanjit Sandhu, a leading exporter of books to the US, said Indian books have high demand in the overseas market.

‘India exports books to 110 different countries and America has emerged as a big market of Indian books, especially based on Sikhism due to the presence of a large Indian diaspora there,’ Sandhu said.