INCQC honours fourteen Indian newspapers, Bhaskar Group bags three

Fourteen Indian newspapers have been awarded membership in the International Newspaper Color Quality Club (INCQC) for 2010 through 2012, the most prestigious award for newspaper print quality world-wide.

29 Jun 2010 | By Samir Lukka

The Bhaskar group bagged three awards for the Gujarati daily Divya Bhaskar at Ahmedabad, the Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar at Jaipur and the English daily DNA at Bengaluru.

HT Media at Greater Noida also won thrice for Hindustan(Hindi), Hindustan Times (English) and English business daily Mint

The other prestigious newspapers who were honoured include Kasturi & Sons’ The Hindu from Thiruvananthapuram, ABP Group’s AnandaBazar Patrika and The Telegraph from Kolkata, Bennett Coleman’s Times of India, Jagran Prakashan’s Dainik Jagran from Noida, The Printers’ Deccan Herald from Bengaluru, Malayala Manorama from Kottayam and Mid Day from Navi Mumbai.

"The INCQC quality initiative helps ensure that the reader receives an attractive, high-quality product and the advertiser an outstanding advertising carrier," said Manfred Werfel, executive director of newspaper production at WAN-IFRA, the world's leading organisation of newspaper and media publishing.

Overall 109 newspapers from 43 countries world-wide received the INCQC 2010-12 awards. The awards, held every two years since 1994, set quality standards for newspaper colour reproduction. The competition requires entrants to print a specific test element and submit examples from production runs over four months.

A book of winning entries will be available at the annual IFRA Expo, to be held in Hamburg, Germany, from 4 to 6 October 2010.

Rakesh Singh, state head production for Bhaskar Print Planet at Ahmedabad, said: "We have been meeting, and exceeding our customers’ expectations vis a vis print quality."

The Bhaskar Print Planet at Ahmedabad inaugurated in November, houses the KBA Prisma web press with nine towers and two Krause CTP among other equipment. Readers of PrintWeek India will recall the 1 January 2010 issue that published the news story of Rs 200-cr KBA powered Divya Bhaskar plant inaugurated at Changodar by Gujarat’s chief minister Narendra Modi.