The new line is being housed in a state-of-the-art, environmentally friendly plant, which will produce the full range of violet and thermal plates from Agfa's stable, including the chemistry-free variety.

With the commissioning of the new plant, the capacity of Indian plate manufacturers will be ahead of the total projected consumption in the country for all varieties of plates for several years, assuming even an optimistic continued growth rate of 15% per year.

Prior to the commissioning of the new plant, Indian plate manufacturers had a production capacity of 18.5m sqm, of which exports constituted approximately 20-25%.

TechNova chairman and managing director Pranav Parikh said: "The quality of Indian plates is comparable with the best in the world, thanks to the technology tie-up with Agfa.

"There is virtually no technology gap between the advanced countries and India in the field of offset plates and chemicals. The time lag between introduction of a new plate by Agfa globally and by TechNova in India, ranges from six to 12 months … the time taken to customise the product and stabilise it for Indian conditions."

As part of its expansion plans, TechNova also plans to launch its VioStar range of violet CTP plates at this month's Drupa, in Düsseldorf, Germany.

The new products will consist of two varieties of violet plates, VioStar N for newspapers and VioStar C for commercial and packaging printers.

Parikh said: "During field-trials, newspapers have reported having achieved run-lengths of 250,000 impressions (without baking).

"We were also pleasantly surprised that commercial printers have reported resolutions similar to thermal plates. We believe that the packaging printers will report run-lengths exceeding thermal plates.

"Due to the lower cost of ownership of violet platesetters and local availability of violet plates, one can expect accelerated pace of conversion from analogue to CTP in all segments of the Indian industry."

The company will also introduce its Thermostar Marathon at Drupa – a machine which is capable of run-lengths of up to 250,000 impressions without baking and up to one million with baking.

Also on show, will be an updated version of its breakthrough invention PoliJet, the world's first and only no-process inkjet CTP system that uses a large-format inkjet printer and standard inkjet inks to image offset plates.