IN A recent episode of “The Simpsons” Grampa Simpson, hallucinating on prescription drugs, drives back in time along the lanes of Springfield. “To the good ol’ days,” he exclaims as he trundles past glossy corporate buildings owned by newspaper giants: Springfield Times, Springfield Daily News and Springfield Tribune. His trip harks back to a different age. Today, in much of the world, newspapers have lost their sheen. India is perhaps among the few countries where Grampa Simpson might still be able to spot the odd building owned by a flourishing local newspaper. Indeed, in India, there are more than 82,000 newspapers in publication. How has the country’s newspaper industry managed to buck the global trend? Last year India’s newspaper industry grew by 8%. Elsewhere, sales and advertising revenues are contracting. Enders Analysis, a research outfit, reckons that between 2014 and 2018 revenues from print advertising in Britain will fall more than a third from £993m ($1.4 billion) to £625m. In India, print publications account for a whopping 43% of all corporate advertising; the figure is less than 15% in America. Between 2010 to 2014 advertising revenues from newspapers in India rose by 40%. Many English dailies slip in supplements which are, in fact, advertorials. This partly explains why annual subscription of a few papers in India cost 399 rupees ($5.80), roughly the cost of a Sunday edition of the New York Times.

Most of this growth is driven by vernacular newspapers. According to the 2014 Indian Readership survey results, Dainik Jagran, a Hindi newspaper, tops the chart with over 16.6m readers. Times of India is the only English newspaper to feature in the top ten. Rising literacy rates coupled with localised content coverage explains the sustained spike in regional newspaper sales. Physical newspapers have also flourished in part because their online versions have failed to woo India’s 400m internet users. Broken links, shoddy user interfaces and ads masquerading as news stories have put readers off. Many 24-hour TV news channels, too, are parodied for covering fluffy news. Newspapers give more clarity to readers who are “confused and looking for the facts” after watching “shrill debates” on TV news channels, said Arun Jaitley, India’s finance minister recently.

Newspapers also go to great lengths to cut costs. To utilise excess capacity, Lokmat, a top-selling Marathi newspaper, uses its factory in Maharashtra to print Maharashtra Times, a competitor. For a small fee, vernacular newspapers tie up with rural entrepreneurs to distribute in smaller towns and villages. Customers, too, are shrewd about picking discount schemes and benefit from selling the paper back to scrap paper dealers. And newspapers continue to have a strong social and cultural significance. Many people remain attached to the paper version of the news, as a stroll down any busy street in India will reveal.