India to hold special festival to mark 60 years of diplomatic ties
The Indian High Commission in Ghana is to organise a “Festival of India” in Ghana from January 25 to March 15, 2017 to commemorate 60 years of diplomatic ties between India and Ghana.
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The festival, which will be in collaboration with Ghana’s Ministry of Tourism, will be held in Accra, Takoradi, Cape Coast, Kumasi and Koforidua.
The Indian High Commissioner to Ghana, Mr Birender Singh, made this known during a courtesy call on the Managing Director of the Graphic Communications Group Limited (GCGL), Mr Kenneth Ashigbey, in Accra yesterday.
He also stated that the festival would include traditional dance, music, film shows, food bazaar and a Yoga workshop.
Commendations
The High Commissioner commended the GCGL for being the largest educative and informative media house in the country and thanked the company for its continuous support for the High Commission through its publications, saying that he was impressed with the Daily Graphic’s supplement on India during its independence celebrations in August last year.
Mr Singh also asked for more of such collaborative efforts to help deepen cultural relationships between Ghana and India.
He called on the management of the GCGL to make its newspapers more youth friendly by adopting the innovation of today`s digital world.
According to him, a lot of the youth were more into surfing the Internet and, therefore, were not interested in reading newspapers.
Technical support
Mr Ashigbey expressed his appreciation to the High Commissioner for his visit and commended the Indian newspaper industry on the achievements that it had made in India, saying at a time when the newspaper circulation was declining all over the world, Indian newspapers continued to thrive due to innovative technologies.
He appealed for technical support from the High Commission to help train journalists of the various brands of GCGL on how to take advantage of the digital era to boost newspaper sales for the company.
He hinted that the GCGL was in the process of striking a deal with an Indian company to set up a subsidiary paper conversion company to serve Ghana and the West African subregion.
According to him, because newsprints were sourced internationally, it made the cost of newspapers very high, as compared to India which is able to produce some of its newsprints locally, thus making the prices of newspapers relatively low.
The Editor of the Daily Graphic, Mr Ransford Tetteh, called on the High Commissioner to help revamp an Indo-African Editors Forum that was launched sometime ago in Addis Ababa to promote exchange of news, saying the group has since its establishment not been very vibrant.
The Director, Newspapers, Mr Yaw Boadu Ayeboafoh, who is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Mass Communications (IMC), also lauded India for its role in training quality journalists from across the world.