Its the beginning of New Year and its time to make some changes. My family and I are newspaper geeks. We enjoy our daily dose of news and gossip everyday over tea. Our day is incomplete without the daily dose.

We’ve been getting monthly newspapers for years together from local vendors on monthly rolling basis. We’ve pretty much scanned through all the newspapers Mumbai has to provide.

Funny enough, I never paid attention to the monthly costs for newspaper at our doorstep. It’s when the newspaper wala handed me the bill and said “bebi… yeh newspaper ka bill sabh ko dedena,” I realized that we almost spend around Rs.1,800+ on news papers alone. I was shocked.

Who thinks about monthly costs of news papers right? No body I know. In fact, if you go to UK you’ll get free newspapers everywhere. No Kidding. After living the London life for 4 years and coming back to Mumbai, I started valuing news papers like never before. (The money you get from raddiwala! It’s the cashback of olden times)

Also, in today’s day and age everyone reads news online through e-papers (free/subscribed) or in-house news bulletins. But, I understand the enjoyment in reading news from a physical paper. So, I said to myself why not check online if newspapers have subscriptions of sorts? And save some money like boondh boondh se banta hai sagaar? Right!

And that’s when I realized (may be too late) that newspapers nowadays do provide annual subscriptions and sometimes five years subscriptions. Not all of them but some do. It all differs from state to state.

Now being newspaper geeks, we like the following news papers only based on their language, content and no over-flowing ads –

  1. The Hindu
  2. Indian Express
  3. The Economics Times
  4. Live Mint
  5. Lokmat
  6. Rozgar Samachar – Employment News

Our daily dose of gossip we conveniently get online. But for Mumbai city updates, Mumbai Mirror perhaps.

But only the following newspapers provide annual subscription in my locality,

  1. Hindustan Times – Rs.710/- only.
  2. DNA – Rs.699/- only.
  3. The Economic Times – Rs.499 or so.
  4. The Times of India – Rs.600 or so.

Now clearly, in a vast contrast to my above list, I had to make a decision for the quality of relevant news. Hence, I finally decided to go ahead with hard copy of Hindustan Times at home and e-subscription of The Hindu for personal use (Rs.699). Taught everyone at home to use newspaper apps for e-news incase if they are not comfortable with browsing though e-papers.

Rest all the papers could be bought through multiple single purchases. Double or Triple costing for Sunday Newspapers!

So go ahead and get in touch with your local vendor or subscribe online. Take charge of small things in household chores and your family will thank you. Things that people generally don’t think about always are the ones that make a big difference.