RIYADH: Saudi and Indian publishing houses have joined hands to launch an Indian regional language news daily in Saudi Arabia called Gulf Thejas. Gulf Thejas is the offshoot of Thejas Daily published in the Malayalam language in Calicut in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Thejas Daily was launched in 2006 by Intermedia Publishing Ltd., a public limited company that formed a joint venture with Al-Ramez Int'l Group, a Saudi company, to publish Gulf Thejas from Riyadh. Gulf Thejas will be officially launched in Riyadh on Thursday by Abdul Rahman Al-Hazza, spokesman of the Ministry of Culture and Information and Supervisor General of Saudi TV. Gulf Thejas is the third Indian regional language news daily to be published from Riyadh. The majority of the two million non-resident Indian workers in Saudi Arabia are from Kerala, where Malayalam is the official state language. M. Osman, managing director of Gulf Thejas for Saudi Arabia, said the new paper will be a 16-page broadsheet published daily from Riyadh. “Within a short period after its launch in India five years ago, Thejas Daily was being printed in editions in five cities and had a distribution of around 100,000 copies in Kerala state,” Osman said. He said plans are underway to launch Gulf Thejas, published in collaboration with Thejas Daily, in other Gulf countries such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar within the next few months. Gulf Thejas will cater to the information needs of the people of Kerala living in the Gulf states, he said. Keeping in mind the general interest of its readers, the paper will cover local news stories and highlight the common welfare of the people, he said. He said that the official launch of the paper will be attended by prominent personalities from a cross-section of Saudi society and the Indian community, including socio-political experts, religious scholars and intellectuals.
