The audacity of the group’s founder Ramniklal Solanki was to start a Gujarati newspaper with no start up capital, at a time when there were few Indians in the UK and when the technology to produce such a paper did not exist in the country.

His ambition, inspired by the then Indian High Commissioner to London, Dr Jivraj Mehta, was to publish a Gujarati newspaper to unite and integrate the community and to keep India’s rich cultural heritage and the Gujarati language alive for future generations. Undeterred by the extraordinary challenges he faced, Ramniklal Solanki and his wife Parvatiben launched Garavi Gujarat on 1st April 1968 as a hand written, cyclo-styled newssheet from a terraced house in Wembley, North West London.

Mr Solanki had collected some advance subscriptions to fund his new journalistic enterprise. From those difficult early beginnings when the paper was produced on a Gujarati typewriter, Mr Solanki travelled across Britain, going from town to city, knocking on doors and selling subscriptions for the paper.

A journalist to the core, Ramniklal Solanki had come to Britain as a foreign correspondent for a group of Indian newspapers some four years before the launch of Garavi Gujarat. His tenacity as a news journalist and his thought-provoking columns won him and the paper many plaudits. The paper rapidly gained a loyal following, forging a reputation for fearless, campaigning journalism that was to become its hallmark in later years. Garavi Gujarat’s circulation grew steadily until 1972 when Idi Amin suddenly expelled Uganda’s largely Gujarati speaking Asian community.

With the influx of the Ugandan Asians into Britain, Garavi Gujarat’s future was assured and its circulation exploded to unprecedented levels.

What to some was an April fool’s joke, was to be become the biggest selling Gujarati publication outside India and the foundation for AMG to build a stable of market leading publications serving the Asian community across globe.

The rest as they say is history.