Gita Press, Gorakhpur

Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bulgarian Bengali Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish

This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. Additional information may please be sent as messages to the Facebook community, Indpaedia.com. All information used will be gratefully acknowledged in your name.

History

2019: increase in sales

Rohan Dua, May 15, 2019: The Times of India

Inside the bustling 1923-built printing press in Gorakhpur, BB Tripathi and Lal Mani Tiwari take every visitor, to verses painted on walls and hand-painted impressions of Lord Krishna and Lord Rama inside the Leela Chitra Mandir.

They have been doing this for three decades now — running up and down between Lila Chitra Mandir and the printing press facility for the Gobind Bhawan Karyala Trust that manages the century-old Gita Press, that publishes Hindu religious texts including Ramcharit Manas, Bhagvad Gita, Ramayana and Mahabharat, Puran and Upanishads among 1,800 such sacred texts. With increased everyday ritual practices and sharp uptick in religiosity, curiosity in texts has grown and the Gita Press is feeding that hunger. It has registered an annual sales turnover of Rs 69 crore, up nearly Rs 22 crore since 2017 when GST was introduced and there were rumours of it impacting sales. “GST certainly increased cost of production but sales are not down. It shows the faith in religious and spiritual knowledge is only increasing day by day,” says sales manager Tripathi, adding, “We recently introduced Upnayan Sanskar and Vivah Paddati last year, based on knowledge of janeyu and wedding rituals.”

Gorakhpur votes on May 19. The trust that publishes texts of Hinduism proudly holds that it has steered clear of political leanings for almost a century. Its officials believe, however, that every political party “must always promote and support religious lectures and knowledge of sacred Hindu texts”. The press works on a no profit-no loss system. Its sales stood at Rs 39 crore in 2016, Rs 47 crore in 2017, Rs 66 crore in 2018 and Rs 69 crore in 2019. In India, it runs 21 wholesale centres of its own but has five retail shops and 52 railway station vends, including one in Kathmandu.