Shishir Dholakia no longer gets the International Herald Tribune at his doorstep a day late -- after hundreds of thousands of other readers worldwide already have seen it. The newspaper is now printed in India.
The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times of London could soon follow.
The world's biggest newspapers are coming to India -- the world's second-largest newspaper market -- to the delight of readers such as Dholakia, a Supreme Court attorney.
"I find international newspapers far more satisfying," said Dholakia. "I think the quality of writing ... is far more readable than Indian papers in English, partly because of the relatively convoluted language employed by our writers."
But India's first engagement with a global paper is headed to court. The IHT has been printed in India since May 31. The government says it hasn't given permission, but the Indian publishers say they don't need it because there is no law barring them.
The controversy is testing whether India's new government headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will back a 2002 decision of his predecessor, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to overturn a decades-old ban and allow 26 percent foreign investment in the newspaper business.
Several other ventures are in the works, aiming to tap into India's multimillion-dollar newspaper advertising market.
The Times of India newspaper has reached an agreement with Dow Jones to produce The Wall Street Journal in India. British media group Pearson PLC, publisher of The Financial Times, has entered into an alliance with the Indian financial daily Business Standard.
London-based Henderson Global Investment picked up a 20 percent share last year in a subsidiary of The Hindustan Times, a leading English-language daily in India.
Those and other planned ventures will cater to the upmarket reader in India, a country currently witnessing an economic boom and one of the fastest growth rates in the world.
More than 72 million newspapers were sold in India each day last year, making it the second largest market in the world after China, with 85 million papers sold, according to a report submitted to the World Newspaper Congress in Turkey this month. Seventy million copies are sold every day in Japan and 55 million in the US.
India is also getting new attention abroad, and now occupies more column inches in global newspaper pages than ever before. Indian companies, particularly in the trailblazing software and outsourcing sectors, are making profits despite a slowdown in the global economy.
"India is a globalizing economy ... there is a huge constituency here for international business news," said Suman Dubey, who will be editor of the Indian edition of The Wall Street Journal.
"There is no reason to deny Indian businessmen access to the world's best financial news and analysis in the same time and manner as their counterparts elsewhere in the world," said Dubey, currently the chief representative of Dow Jones India.
None of the papers has given subscriber projections.
Authorities were caught off guard when an Indian company, Midram Publication Pvt Ltd, began printing the IHT to tap into that market. Priced at 30 rupees (US$0.65), the Indian IHT costs a third the price of copies imported from Bangkok. So far, it doesn't have locally produced content.
Senior officials of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting declined comment. Local news reports quoted unnamed government officials saying the IHT publication was a violation of government policy, particularly a 1955 Cabinet resolution that banned such ventures.
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