Spotlight: Hanumantha Rao
“It was 1962. I was a journalist before establishing Pragati. My first job was the printing of stationery and letterheads for soldiers. But our first major print job was printing 70,000 copies of a book for the government.
03 Mar 2015 | 2488 Views | By PrintWeek India
Initially, like most printers in India, we possessed a single colour press. In the past few decades we have metamorphosed into a world class press which is capable of printing high-end multi-colour.
Pragati Offset bagged the coveted Elephant and SAPPI International Printer of the Year 2008 award at Cape Town last October. The winning entry was our own calendar, in the category “Printer's Own Promotion”. This was the second time that we won this prestigious award - we had previously won it in the year 2006. The calendar had multiple 3D embossing, foiling with overprinting, gloss, textured and glitter UV varnishes and new technologies such as holographic UV coatings.
Our jobs are printed on a fleet of Mitsubishis (four) and Komoris (three) presses which can print up to six colours with online coating in a single pass. Our latest Mitsubishi six colour UV press with a double coater allows us to print a range of substrates such as plastics, metallised sheets, etc. The double coater opens up possibilities for a range of inline finishing options.
We adhere to a tangible approval cycle based on a PDF-based soft proofing as well as colour calibrated proofs on Epson inkjet printers with a GMG ColorProof RIP. Once approved, final PostScript or PDF is generated and put through our workflows and plates are output on our CTP systems. We also help customers reuse their data by preparing PDFs or exporting content HTML for using on web/CDs, etc...”
An interview with Hanumantha Rao from the PrintWeek India archives