Labels and packaging opportunities galore in East India

Kolkata, the capital city of West Bengal in India and the former capital of British India, is one of India’s metropolitan cities and a major port that lies on the banks of the Hoogly river.

Your correspondent visited Kolkata in June this year to meet label printers and was surprised to learn that not many are using the port and exporting labels. These printers are mostly dependent on local business from West Bengal and neighboring states including Sikkim, Orissa, Bihar and seven other states in northeast India.

While most converters print numbered labels or make blank labels for the garment manufacturing industry in Bangladesh, bidi labels – a thin, Indian cigarette filled with tobacco flakes and wrapped in a leaf tied with a string at one end – is a huge market in rural India. These labels are printed on a thin sheet of paper and then manually wrapped around a pack of bidis.

Converters such as PB Holotech and NAP Printers house label presses with gravure printing stations for printing high quality bidi labels in multiple colors. In addition, they have value-added features such as hot foil stamping and holograms to combat counterfeiting of bidi brands.

Industrial development in the neighboring state of Sikkim has presented printers in Kolkata with a huge opportunity to tap the growing industry in the region. Many pharmaceutical companies including Cipla, Sun Pharma, Intas Pharmaceutical, Zydus Cadilla and Unichem among others have shifted their manufacturing facilities to Sikkim, catalyzing the growth of supporting industries. Rango, a small industrial area in Sikkim, has become a major center for carton manufacturing. Blister packaging is also becoming a big market.

The rising potential of East India is also well indicated by the major expansion of folding carton manufacturers. Assam-based packaging specialist York Print Group opened its second plant in Guwahati, Assam in 2013, and TCPL Packaging, one of India’s largest manufacturers of printed folding cartons, inaugurated a new plant in Guwahati in 2014.