Due to the huge surge in demands for Ramayana-related scriptures ahead of Ram Lalla Pran Pratishtha has run out of Ramcharitmanas stock, Gita Press has been making investments to bolster their printing and binding lines.
 
The press has a battery of web offset and sheetfed presses. In addition, the factory in Gorakhpur boasts of softcover offline binders from Bindwel and hardcover book block solutions from Muller Martini. During 2023, the press run by a governing council (trust board) embarked on a search to modernise their printing and post-printing infrastructure.

The press manager Lalmani Tiwari and production manager Ashutosh Kumar Upadhyay were at the helm of the ops, along with the trustees in evaluating various options.

Speaking to PrintWeek magazine, Anikumar Nair, the national sales director of Bindwel said: "Initially we discussed offline solutions, as the factory infrastructure could accept that easily. However, since the productivity requirement is huge, the board quickly realised that only an inline solution will suffice. Then followed an elaborate evaluation process of visiting multiple installations of our Bindlines." The Gita Press visited the factories of publisher-printers to textbook printers and even high quality book print exporters like Replika Press.

According to the press manager Tiwari, "the focus at Gita Press was productivity, quality and accuracy as the prime objectives for bookbinding, followed by cost effectiveness. The books are distributed close to cost prices and the cost per book is a very important concern." Tiwari added, "We have decades of relationship with Bindwel and their team members and we rate their machines and services as world class. The evaluation process involved taking trials of the machine with our specific requirement and samples, and was to our complete satisfaction."

Tiwari said Gita Press prints 75,000 copies of the scripture, this year they published one lakh copies, and still all stock was exhausted. He said that apart from Ramcharitmanas, demands for Sundar Kand and Hanuman Chalisa have also increased. He said that there was a demand for 50,000 copies of Ramcharitmanas from Jaipur, and 10,000 copies were ordered from Bhagalpur, but they could not fulfil the orders. Gita Press is also getting orders from its branches to distribute the scriptures, which the press is unable to fulfil.

Which is why the new investments are "an absolute must".

Meanwhile Nair shared with PrintWeek that the configuration for Gita Press includes a Signa Gatherer with Bindwel Signature Recognition System. This, he said, will recognise any wrong signature and eject out the bookblock. 

Arvind Kalasur, the director technical support with the Bindwel group said, "This specialised system that is accurate and provides a huge return on investment was developed with the support of Baumer who are world leaders in this application. Added to this, our No Signature - multiple signatures detection system makes the collating of signatures error proof".

Nair said, "We have supplied similar systems to Replika and many other customers in Africa and India", added Anil Kumar Nair. "The Trimit 50C trimmer selected by Gita Press is a recent add-on to our trimmer family and supports high speed inline trimming.

The Gita Press team travelled to Bengaluru for the factory acceptance test (FAT). Also they understood the process followed by Bindwel. The team tested each of the machines that they had ordered, waiting for dispatch.  

Trimit 50C being tested in Bengaluru before its dispatch to Gita press, Gorakhpur

As you are reading this story, the Bindwel bindery is on its way from Bengaluru to Gorakhpur. Lalmani Tiwari said, "The post-press equipment will add considerable capacity to the book printing infrastructure of the premier publisher of Hindu scriptures."