Print in Najibabad: Gahlot Printing Press

“The new modes of communications has made everything fast. You upload your file, transfer the money and you will get your job done the same day or next day,” Gahlot says. “Once the job is done, we drop a message and send the jobs by bus.”

And Gahlot Printing Press does all this using a single-colour offset printing press. The business was started by Gahlot’s father Rampal Singh Gahlot in 1965. As he was not very interested in studies, Gahlot joined the business in 1989. Offset printing came to Najibabad in 2000, and Gahlot shifted from treadle machine to an offset press in 2011.

The company’s core business is wedding invitation cards. “Wedding season is the peak time for us. The town is full of competition now as a number of printers have popped up. We print wedding cards for five to eight clients per day, beside other commercial jobs, such as visiting cards, envelopes, bill books etc.,” Gahlot says.

Explaining the reason why he is still running the single-colour machine, Gahlot says, “If we go for a four-colour machine, we need at least Rs 5 crore and we need around Rs 1 crore to run the business. If we invest such money in Najibabad, we wouldn’t be able to recover it because we wouldn’t have enough work to feed the machine.”