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2 min readNew DelhiFeb 17, 2026 04:30 AM IST
Vivek Gupta, INS president, expressed serious concern regarding the current situation of domestic newsprint in the country.
Domestic newsprint production has been struggling to cross the 0.5 million tonne mark, even as India’s annual newsprint consumption is approximately 1.2 million tonne, and thus meeting only 40% of total newsprint demand, the Indian Newspaper Society (INS) has said earlier this month.
In a statement on February 3, Vivek Gupta, INS president, expressed serious concern regarding the current situation of domestic newsprint in the country. “India’s annual newsprint consumption is approximately 1.2 million tonnes, while domestic production has struggled to cross the 0.5 million tonnes,” the statement noted.
Indian mills are currently able to meet only about 40% of the total newsprint demand, “underscoring a major hollowing out of the industry”, as the statement noted that this gap has persisted for over two decades, with no meaningful expansion in dedicated newsprint manufacturing capacity.
It said that owing to this inherent constraint, newspaper publishers are compelled to rely on imports to ensure uninterrupted supply and distribution, which remains essential for informed public discourse in this country.
It further said that, regarding claims about sufficient capacity to meet the publishers’ demand, data from the industry body of the domestic newsprint industry show negligible exports of only about 18,000 tonnes cumulatively over the last 15 years (2010-11 to 2024-25).
“Such minuscule export volumes clearly establish the absence of any surplus capacity, which they have claimed so far,” it added.
The INS had earlier appealed to the government to reconsider the imposition of a 5% customs duty on newsprint, which, it said, will come as a much-needed relief to the print media industry.
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