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W R Paulraj, BSI Marketing Director
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BANGALORE, India — The Bible Society of India (BSI) recently celebrated the launch of the first Children’s Bibles to be published in languages of India. The new Scriptures in Telugu, Gujarati, Tamil and Malayalam were dedicated during the official opening of a Book Room that will provide the people of Bangalore with a place to read and purchase Scriptures.
The Children’s Bibles are the first four of a planned 14 different language editions to be published with funding from the UBS global Scripture initiative, Opportunity 21 (O-21). The remaining 10 editions, in Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Khasi, Manipuri, Marathi, Mizo, Oriya, Punjabi, and Urdu, will be published as funding becomes available.
Translation work on the next four language
versions is already under way.
Present at the launch ceremony in September were the Rev William Jefferson,
UBS O-21 Global Coordinator, and Tom McCallie, Executive Director
of the Maclellan Foundation, a major O-21 donor.
W R Paulraj, BSI Marketing Director, told the gathering about the great demand for Children’s Bibles in India, where 350 million people are under the age of 15. He said that when the BSI published a Children’s Bible in English in the late 1980s, the public response was so overwhelming that the Society realised the desperate need to publish these Scriptures in major Indian languages.
High costs
But it soon became apparent that the high production costs would put the prices of the Children’s Bibles beyond the pockets of ordinary people, and the BSI was unable to implement the project.
Last year, however, O-21 agreed to fund the project and the BSI set about producing the first four new translations, which it completed in nine months. The support from O-21 will enable the BSI to translate and publish 215,000 Children’s Bibles in 14 languages, and sell them at highly subsidised prices that even the poorest families will be able to afford. (WR 365/31 - 12.01) [PHOTOS]