A Legend in Labels passes away! RIP: Kartar Singh Dunglay

Sardar Kartar Singh Dunglay the founder and owner of Good Work Company New Delhi breathed his last in the intervening night of 7th and 8th of April 2013. He had been ill for the last few months, the end came peacefully. He was 78 years of age.

Labels: Growing under pressure!

As February 2013 was coming to an end, the biggest Indian printing and packaging show Printpack 2013 was held at the India Expo Centre and Mart, Greater NOIDA. The centre that  appears to be a risk selection, as compared to the New Delhi’s Pragati Maidan, yet event organizers seem to be persistently inclined to move and host their well known successful shows at this venue. I can attribute only one reason for this; the high handedness of ITPO and the ever increasing prices. Competition is the buzzword and this is evident from the effort that event organisers put into the promotions to make it a success. IPAMA the event organizers for Printpack had projected that 50000 visitors would visit the show. Due to the changed venue and the logistical disadvantage, many in the print industry felt the target was ambitious and the number of visitors to the show would see a decline. The post show figure available on the Printpack website is extremely surprising. The organizers claim a 40% increase in footfall and that a mammoth 70000 visitors came to the show! Incredible as it sounds and if this is so, other events that have traditionally been held at Pragati Maidan may also start considering this venue for future showings. It is indeed a wake-up call for the government sponsored organization ITPO to gear up to meet the challenge of competition. Personally I feel Pragati Maidan really needs to change. They need to upgrade such that the venue is friendly to not only visitors but also event organizers. ITPO is sitting over large tract of prime real estate in the National capital with metro connectivity. They are backed by the central government, it is time they converted this venue to be amongst the best in the world. Something like how they transformed the Delhi International airport.

Evolution of self-adhesive label producing technologies in India

This article, written by Harveer Sahni, was first published in the UK in the March 2013 issue of FlexoTech magazine, www.flexotechmag.com 
(http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/6b6df2ac#/6b6df2ac/30).

In 2006 I chronicled the history of self adhesive label in India, to collect inputs from veterans who were the initiators of these products, I went to visit Jeetubhai in Mumbai, the first Indian to start self adhesive label production in roll form in India. Now as I prepared to put together the whole process of evolution from early seventies to now, yet again, I decided to call the grand old man Jeetubhai who is now 78 years old and get his inputs. Yes, he did oblige!

How do we label the future

Labelling the future is a challenge for the label industry, in the face of the exceptional change that is happening on many fronts.   A developing palette of label technologies and alternative options;  the ‘cloud’ business environment;  the urgent need for succession change in SMEs;  making the decision to stay local, serve a specialty market segment, or go international;   maturing geographical markets versus the emerging economies… 

Labelstocks: Manage moisture to control curl

In the late 1970s early eighties, I was just a commercial siliconiser selling reams of release paper or silicon paper in sheets to screen printers producing stickers. Those days only a handful of labelstock producers existed in India so supplying in roll form came a few years later. While my product found general acceptance in quality yet once in a while a customer would come back with a strange problem. They complained of either tubing or curl in the final gum sheets that they made using my product. These sticker manufacturers would coat with a screen, a pressure sensitive adhesive on the back of a semi gloss or chromo art paper, air dry in racks and then paste the release paper on the back to protect this pressure sensitive adhesive and produce pre-gummed sheets. These sheets eventually were screen printed and half cut with a shaving blade to make stickers. Since this tubing and curling problem was rather occasional and came to me rarely, it was something that did not lead to total rejection. Strange as it seemed, the complainants would go silent after a few days of the initial rhetoric. Another fact that has stuck to my mind since then is that the same customers would state that similar paper coming from Mumbai did not have such problem. As is normal, in the initial years of business, I presumed that these few customers were biased and were speaking for my competitors in Mumbai. Some years later in the mid eighties I developed saturated paper liners on various papers including sack Kraft and newsprint. Interestingly, I exhibited a newspaper converted to be a release paper in the first Screen Print Show at Nehru Centre Mumbai in the year 1994. When I started to sell these saturated release papers with a rough and porous back, I was surprised to note that not a single complaint came for curl or tubing! At this time the chemist in me woke up and I decide to research the process.