President of India, Pratibha Patil inaugurates Gopsons' deal of printing 120-million Census forms

The Noida-based book and security print specialist bagged the contract for printing of the 120-million census forms for the Indian government.

The world's largest, the campaign aims to cover the entire nation in two phases, with each phase requiring 60-million forms to be printed and supplied.

The census process is scheduled to be completed by end-September 2010.

Gaurav Goel, director at Gopsons Paper and head of the security print division, said: "This is a prestigious and gigantic project in size. The project has to be delivered within a strict deadline. At Gopsons, we are hoping to match this with the highest quality standards to ensure that these machine-readable ICR forms - are 100% perfect in all regards."

Gopsons will use a fleet of rotary web offset presses in combination with high speed variable printing machines to produce these ICR forms. With a high speed Muller Martini Concept mid-web presses mounted with the Kodak Versamark digital printing heads 6240 - Gopsons is producing almost - two million A3 size forms in a day.

These presses run at a speed of almost 225 mtr/min and engage production team of 45.

The printed products are finished using online cutting and packing machines and packed in specially designed boxes which will be distributed to the tehsils across the 35 states and Union territories of India.

Gopsons Papers had invested USD 5-million in security print division in 2009. The company also has  an offshore security printing plant in Sri Lanka.