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Each winter season, the New Delhi Book Fair brings to the city a treat for book lovers, an international gathering of publishers, authors, intellectuals and book lovers. This year the World Book Fair is bigger, with more titles and subjects, and a vast collection of reading material. Changing with the times, there are e-books and electronic repositories, nestling with good old-fashioned print. Reflecting India�s unique diversity, there are books in hundreds of languages, on a wide range of themes and in many formats. The Fair is being organized from 9 to 17 January 2016 by the National Book Trust (NBT), in collaboration with the India Trade Promotion Organisation.

The 24th edition of the New Delhi World Book Fair was inaugurated on the 9th of this month at Pragati Maidan by the Union Minister of Human Resource Development, Smt. Smriti Zubin Irani. She spoke of the catalytic role that books can play, opening new horizons and world, and bringing, especially to children the knowledge and learning that would shape their lives to a better future. In her inaugural speech, she referred to a slew of initiatives that the Ministry of Human Resource Development has initiated, from a nation wide reading campaign to be launched later in the year, to the measures to encourage expression and learning in the many languages and dialects of the nation.

Smt Irani appreciated the efforts undertaken by the NBT to bring out 16 new titles under the Navlekhan series and hoped that NBT would bring to the fair next year a vastly expanded and diverse collection of books in the major languages of the country, as well as many dialects.

Breaking new ground, this year, children from different parts of the country, from Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Manipur, Assam amongst others would travel, as Indians did many years ago, to countries that have been influenced by Indian culture and tradition, on a journey of discovery, of study and documentation. Accompanied by teachers and by experienced photographers, these shodh yatris would record what they saw in foreign countries like Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia for their friends and fellow students back home.

Smt. Irani welcomed the large delegation from the partner country, the People�s Republic of China, led by Mr. Sun Shoushan, Vice Minister, SAPPFRT, China. She said that art and literature know no boundaries, and books would be another force that would bind the two friendly countries together.

Source: Press Information Bureau, Govt of India

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