WAN-IFRA’s World Printers Forum has just announced the new members of its International Color Quality Club, ICQC 2018–2020. In this 13th edition of the color quality print contest, 67 publication titles from 54 publications in 20 countries have gained club membership. This year the number of entries from Asia, particularly from India, has grown, and showed the enormous efforts made by publishers and printers to print high-quality standardised quality across the printing centre and to become part of the club.

Jagati Publications Ltd, an Indian language newspaper publisher headquartered in Hyderabad, has registered all their 22 printing centres and bagged membership for all their printing plants in this International Color Quality Club contest. This is the first time in the history of the ICQC that a publication has registered all its print centres and won membership to all of them. The ICQC contest follows tough regimen that requires participating publications to print good quality and consistently over a three month period.

Jagati Publications was established in the year 2008, with 22 branches started on the same day of the inauguration. Jagati publishes the daily newspaper titled ‘Sakshi’ in Telugu language, a language spoken in Andra Pradesh and Telangana states of India. They have an average circulation of 1.1 million copies per day.  

Jagati uses Indian made printing presses in all their print centres, equipped with auto registration systems and some of them with closed-loop inking system. The printing presses are of 2/1 type, with four towers and one folder configuration, and run at average speed of around 40,000 copies per hour. The presses are around 10 years old. 

Mr. P V K Prasad, Director-Operations said: “The planning and executionteam led by T K Suresh, Chief General Manager, and B Gowri Sankar, General Manager, have worked tremendously on 3M concept (Men, Machine & Material) and worked without compromising on any single element associated with this project”. Prasad also praised that their main objective was to standardise and improve their print quality uniformly and consistently across all the 22 printing centres. This was achieved by developing an internal quality program called “SIQ” (Sakshi Internal Quality) which also helped in contesting and winning the only international quality contest for newspapers and magazines, ICQC 2018–2020. He also added: “It helps us to satisfy all our esteemed advertisers with our world-class print standards from all our print centres across the states (of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh)”.

This is the first time in the history of the ICQC contest, that a company contesting from all their printing centres has secured the coveted membership. This is undoubtedly a milestone for Jagati’s initiatives in standardizing their print process to high quality standards and first of its kind in the world of the newspaper industry. 

Manfred Werfel, Deputy CEO of WAN-IFRA, congratulated the management and team of Jagati Publications for their finest achievement and wishes them well for success in their future goal of entering into the WAN-IFRA’s Star Club, the prestigious club for high quality newspaper printers. He added that high quality printing is always possible, irrespective of the printing infrastructure, with proper planning and standard discipline.

See the press release on the results of ICQC 2018–2020 here.

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