Prime Minister of India - Dr. Manmohan Singh

PM’s remarks at the centenary celebrations of the Oxford University Press India

“It gives me great pleasure to be here in the midst of such distinguished gathering to celebrate the centenary of the Oxford University Press India. I recall the day nearly five decades ago when I heard with great joy that the OUP had decided to accept my doctoral dissertation for publication! I was fortunate to have the famous John Hicks as my examiner. He was also the trustee of OUP. It also made my task easier to get my dissertation published. I dare say that many of the distinguished audience gathered here today also have a connection with the OUP as both authors and readers.

For a century, the Oxford University Press India has made vigorous and varied contributions to our intellectual life and provided a window to the entire range of intellectual opinion in India. In the early years it published scholarly political and economic writings by Surendranath Banerjee and D.R. Gadgil. It also published books by Salim Ali and Jim Corbett in the 1940s for lay readers. In the 1980s it published the writings of a very influential school of colonial and post colonial history in its ‘Subaltern Series’. I understand that later this year the Oxford History of Contemporary Indian Business is due to be published.

These days parents often lament the decline in the reading habit among their children. But, given the crowds one sees at our book fairs and the growth of the publishing industry in India I am not sure if we exaggerate this fear. For example, I understand that OUP India’s own sales have tripled over the last ten years.

I see a great hunger for knowledge in our country. We need to provide our people, particularly our youth, access to quality books. While publishing houses may worry more about the number of books sold, we in government must focus on number of books read! The challenge for us is to widen the population of readers, not just the market for books.

It is with this objective in mind that we recently commissioned a National Mission for Libraries, anchored in our Ministry of Culture. The Mission will focus on improvement of the public library system of the country particularly concentrating on the States where library development is lagging behind. The National Mission hopes to cover approximately 9,000 libraries in three years. It will conduct a national census on libraries, work towards upgradation of infrastructure of reading resources, and seek to modernize and promote the networking of libraries.

I take this opportunity to urge every State Government and every Municipality and Panchayat to pay special attention to the setting up and maintenance of public libraries, including community, locality and village libraries.

The mission that I have been talking about cannot succeed through governmental effort alone. We have to rope in resources available in the community, private sector and non-governmental organisations. Affordable modern information technology can be deployed today to extend the resources of our libraries. A young reader sitting in his village public library should be able to access books and information from across the world.

For decades, development economists would say that India’s population is its curse. Today, as many developed economies grapple with the challenge of ageing, the world has come to recognise that India with its youthful population and skilled manpower has the capability to bridge the human resources gap in the global knowledge economy.

India has a large number of young people hungry for education, skills and training and this number is growing in leaps and bounds. It is a challenge as well as an opportunity for us to equip them with the skills they need to find productive, gainful employment and a means to a better future. Our government has taken a number of steps to increase literacy, ramp up higher education particularly in science and engineering, impart skills to young citizens and develop vocational education.

If we can achieve what we have set out to do, then we can create a huge asset pool in this new knowledge based world. India can fuel the engines of growth of the global knowledge economy. But for this the world has to remain open to the flow of such talent and skills. It is for this reason that India seeks a multilateral rule-based regime for the movement of not just intellectual property but also knowledge embodied in natural persons.

I commend the work done by Oxford University Press India in spreading the light of knowledge in our country. I wish to take note of two particular initiatives. The first is the effort of the Press in publishing bilingual dictionaries in Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Marathi and many others. The other is OUP’s translations programme, through which a 100 titles, including a number of anthologies of Urdu, Bengali, Malayalam Dalit and Tamil Dalit writing, have been published.

I conclude by conveying my very best wishes to the Oxford University Press India and hoping that they will continue to provide leadership to the publishing industry in the country for many, many years to come.”