Bachon ki Duniya
Bachon ki Duniya is an Urdu-language monthly magazine for children, published from New Delhi by the National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language (NCPUL), the Government of India's autonomous body for the promotion of Urdu. Its name means "The Children's World", and since its launch in 2013 it has become, in its publisher's description, the largest-circulated Urdu children's magazine — a 64-page, fully coloured monthly that the Council credits with being an instant hit with young readers.
The magazine is one of the four periodicals produced by the NCPUL's Editorial Section, alongside the monthly Urdu Duniya, the women's monthly Mahnama Khawateen Duniya and the quarterly research journal Fikr-o-Tahqeeq. Of the four, Bachon ki Duniya carries the Council's mission to its youngest audience: children encountering Urdu not as a school subject but as a language of stories, pictures, jokes and curiosity.
The Publisher and Its Mission
The National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language is an autonomous body under the Ministry of Education, Department of Higher Education, Government of India, which began operations in Delhi on 1 April 1996. As the national nodal agency for Urdu, its objectives include promoting, developing and propagating the language and making modern knowledge available in it. Its listed functions specifically include the production of Urdu literature including children's literature, textbooks and reference works, and the publication of journals and periodicals in furtherance of those objects.
A children's monthly is a strategic instrument for such a council. Languages are sustained by readers, and readers are made in childhood. Bachon ki Duniya was the Council's answer to a recognised problem in Urdu publishing: the shrinking shelf of magazines through which Urdu-reading children could simply enjoy their language.
Launch in 2013 and Founding Editorship
The NCPUL launched Bachon ki Duniya in 2013; the Council's archive lists issues from the magazine's first year, including a June 2013 number. The founding editor was Nusrat Zaheer, the Urdu writer, satirist and translator, who was also associated for a time with the Council's research journal Fikr-o-Tahqeeq. Zaheer was a fitting choice for a children's title: he had written satirical pieces for children's magazines including Payam-e-Taleem, and his collection of articles for young readers won an award from the Delhi Urdu Academy.
The magazine's early reception, by the Council's account, justified the launch. NCPUL describes Bachon Ki Duniya as having proved an instant hit after its 2013 launch and as the largest-circulated Urdu magazine in its category — a striking outcome in a segment of publishing widely described as being in decline.
Format and Pricing
Bachon ki Duniya is a 64-page magazine printed in colour throughout. Its price, as listed by the Council, is ₹10 per copy with an annual subscription of ₹100 — deliberately nominal pricing, well below commercial children's magazines, reflecting the Council's objective of putting the magazine into as many young hands as possible rather than maximising revenue.
Each issue pairs its articles with pictorial graphics matched to the content, a design choice the Council highlights as central to the magazine's appeal to children of all ages within its readership. In format and price alike, it is built as an accessible object: cheap enough for a school or a parent to buy without deliberation, and visual enough to compete for a child's attention.
Content: Science, Culture, History and Laughter
The Council describes the magazine's articles as scientific, cultural, historical and comical in nature. That four-part mix defines the editorial formula. Science articles feed curiosity and, in the publisher's words, help hone children's rational thinking and enhance their scientific temperament. Cultural and historical pieces connect young readers to the heritage carried in the Urdu language. The comical element — stories, humour and jokes — keeps the magazine a pleasure rather than a lesson.
The balance is the point. A government children's magazine risks reading like a textbook; Bachon ki Duniya's formula holds instruction and entertainment together, using pictures and humour as the delivery system for knowledge. For many of its readers it also functions as supplementary reading that strengthens Urdu literacy itself — vocabulary, script fluency and reading habit — acquired without the frame of an examination.
The World It Entered: Urdu Children's Magazines in Decline
To understand the magazine's significance, it helps to see the field it entered. Writing on the state of Urdu children's literature in 2016, the veteran children's author surveyed the surviving Urdu children's magazines and produced a short list: Noor, published from Rampur; Payam-e-Taleem, published by Maktaba Jamia in Delhi; Gul Bootey from Mumbai; Umang, the Urdu Academy Delhi's monthly; Bachchon ki Duniya from the NCPUL; and Paigham-e-Taleem from Delhi. Of these, only two were government-run, and the rest, he wrote, were fighting for survival, with very few children left buying and reading Urdu monthlies.
Against that background, a new government-backed entrant that became the largest-circulated title in its field was a significant intervention. Bachon ki Duniya did not merely join a list of survivors; by its publisher's account it led it, demonstrating that the audience for an Urdu children's magazine still existed when the magazine was colourful, cheap and widely distributed.
Digital Presence and Library Record
Issues of the magazine are listed on the NCPUL website among the Council's periodicals, and digitised numbers have entered the wider Urdu digital library through Rekhta, the online Urdu literature repository. Rekhta's records for Bachchon Ki Duniya issues list the publisher as the Director of the Qaumi Council Bara-e-Farogh-e-Urdu Zaban — the Council's name in Urdu — from New Delhi, with contributions associated with the Ghalib Academy, Delhi; its issue records span the magazine's volumes across the 2010s, including numbers from its third, fourth and fifteenth volumes.
The magazine's longevity is visible in that record alone: a children's monthly that reaches a fifteenth volume has outlasted most of the titles it was launched alongside. Within the Council's own accounts of its digital ambitions, Bachon ki Duniya also stood as evidence for its leadership's stated determination to launch Urdu into the digital world, alongside hundreds of book titles and its established monthlies.
Part of a Wider Publishing Programme
Bachon ki Duniya sits inside one of the largest Urdu publishing programmes in India. In an interview given around the magazine's launch period, the Council's leadership described an output of nearly 1,200 book titles, with some 100 books on information technology in preparation, and a stated determination to launch Urdu into the digital world by uploading its publications online. The same account noted that the Council's monthly Urdu Duniya then had a circulation of over 28,000 a month and that its research quarterly, Fikr o Tahqeeq, was being brought out regularly — the publishing family into which the new children's monthly was born in 2013.
That context matters for the magazine's survival prospects. A standalone commercial children's monthly lives or dies by its own sales; Bachon ki Duniya is carried by an institution whose book programme, book fairs and distribution networks can sustain a ₹10 magazine as a matter of policy. The Council is also a presence in the world of Urdu children's writing itself — it has, for example, published children's books by established authors in the field and recognised children's writers with awards at events such as the Bengaluru National Urdu Book Fair.
Place in Urdu Children's Publishing
Bachon ki Duniya occupies a specific and important niche: it is the Indian state's principal Urdu magazine for children, published by the national Urdu council at a price almost any family can afford, in a format designed to delight, with content intended to make its readers more curious, more rational and more at home in their language. In a market where Urdu children's periodicals have repeatedly folded for want of readers and revenue, its survival and claimed circulation leadership since 2013 make it one of the notable facts of contemporary Urdu publishing — and a working proof that the youngest generation of Urdu readers has not disappeared, but was waiting to be published for.
