Cosmo India is a heavyweight in more ways than one

The October issue of Cosmopolitan in India weighs almost five pounds and has 1,016 pages. There's grist for your next cocktail party chat. According to a story on the Time.com website, publishing is booming in the country, with 203 million people reading a newspaper every day and new magazines being launched every day.

"It's a sunrise moment for Indian publishing," says Mala Sekhri, publishing director of Cosmopolitan India and the brains behind the 10th anniversary issue — the biggest of any Cosmo edition anywhere ever. "It's really not as developed or evolved as the U.S. or U.K. But it's growing fast." Sekhri got the idea for a 1,000-page edition when she visited Cosmopolitan's New York headquarters two years ago. "The Russian edition had just put out an issue around 850 pages," she remembers. "I told them: India will soon catch up."

Time's Simon Robinson noted that only a small proportion of India's women can afford the expensive products that Cosmo and magazines like it advertise. But in a country so huge and growing so fast, there are enough and the demographics are very attractive.

If you tally up turnover in the television, radio, publishing, film, music and advertising industries, India's media market is currently worth some $8 billion a year. But PricewaterhouseCoopers reckons that will grow to $19 billion in the next five years. Oh, and then there's the demographics. In 2020 the average Indian will be just 29 years old — a fact that gets advertisers and retailers almost as excited as a Cosmo cover line.

While there are still ownership restrictions (which will probably be relaxing), foreign publishers are getting a piece of this business by licensing titles like Cosmo, Reader's Digest, Scientific American, Golf Digest and Good Housekeeping to large, India publishers such as the India Today Group.