Amid the skyrocketing prices of commodities of everyday use, the least talked about is the price of newsprint. This is despite the fact that in modern life one cannot think of a day without printed matters, especially, books and newspapers. Strangely, the importance of newsprint, which is the key ingredient that feeds the nation's knowledge sector, seems to have been lost on the authorities concerned. Consider that even when the most pandemic-affected industries received generous bailout packages from the public exchequer, despite being declared as an industry, the newspaper failed to get any financial support from the government. Unsurprisingly, the price of newsprint which was on the rise even before the pandemic, has now gone through the roof, thanks to the fallouts from the pandemic and the ongoing Ukraine war. Now, experiencing a 100 per cent price hike of newsprint, the newspaper industry, as feared by some of its prominent insiders, is faced with an existential threat.
In fact, the newspaper industry, or the entire publishing industry for that matter, has been limping along since long. The reasons include shortage of waste paper used for production of newsprint as well as increased import costs of some other raw materials. Notably, the scarcity of waste paper, for instance, turned acute particularly during the pandemic when newspapers went mostly online for obvious reasons. Driven by the fear that newspapers might be a carrier of Covid-19, many people avoided reading printed newspapers and switched to their electronic version. Alongside it, with the suspending of in-person class attendances in schools during the pandemic, imparting of lessons to students also went online.
All this resulted in the marked reduction in the use of newsprint and what inevitably followed from it was the paucity of a raw material for the newsprint industry, waste paper. Also, add to it the rise in the cost of chemicals used in the industry, Taka's continued depreciation against US dollar, supply chain disruptions due to the Russia-Ukraine war, increase in shipping costs and a host of other related factors. So, once the situation got back to normal, newsprint saw a sudden rise in its demand. As expected, the upshot of it all has been this runaway hike in newsprint's price. The problem is not centred just around the rise in newsprint's price alone. Its price volatility is also a major headache of newsprint traders. As reported in this paper on Saturday (September 8), the newsprint including other papers has been undergoing frequent changes in their prices in recent times.
Also, the primary ingredient of different types of paper, pulp, has been witnessing a sharp rise and fall in its price in the international market. Obviously, the traders in this sector are counting heavy losses as a result. This is an ill omen for the publishing sector including the newspaper industry. Against this backdrop, the government has kept the 30 per cent corporate tax imposed on newspaper as before despite repeated call for its withdrawal. There is also the burden of 15 per cent Value-Added Tax (VAT) in addition to import tax on newsprint. The situation obtaining in the newspaper industry has reached a crisis point. So, it is urgent that the government extended all the support the newspaper sector deserves as an industry.