By Papri Sri Raman
Chennai, (IANS) Everyone in her village was surprised when Jogamaya’s father registered online to find a match for her.
“The computer was at the district office where land records are kept and people find out vegetable prices and pay electric bills. How could we get a husband for me there!” says the resident of Borenur in Adilabad district of Andhra Pradesh in southern India.
“Our village was distant and my father was not rich. To find a groom for me in the village was difficult. I had thought I would never get married,” says the 23-year-old.
But within a year Jogamaya was married and today she is a mother of two.
As a young India grows, 150 million people are looking for alliances every year and even villagers are getting married using the internet, says Murugavel Janakiraman of bharatmatrimony.com.
Adilabad is one of the districts in Andhra Pradesh that comes under the Rajiv Internet Village Association which has 1,148 delivery centres for the B2C (business to citizen) service, which includes money transfers, registration with matrimonial sites, astrology and phone card sales.
In Jogamaya’s case, her husband’s family in Chittoor accessed a PCO/ISD booth converted into a rural service delivery centre by APOnline to surf the net and register with a matrimonial site three years ago.
Andhra Pradesh plans to have 8,000 such net-enabled B2C service centres in 22 districts by 2010 “for the social and economic benefit of all sections of society”, says Prashanth Reddy of APOnline.
With about 400 million people between the ages of 18 and 30 and the population slated to rise by 350 million over the next 25 years, slowly but surely, online matrimonial serviice providers are beginning to reach out to rural India.
“Partner search online is growing at 100 percent and we expect it to become a $100 million business by next year,” Janakiraman told IANS.
His company provides partner search services like the Jagriti e-seva available in 15 Punjab districts. Then there are the Akshay Kendra services in Kerala and Rajiv Internet Village Association kiosks in Andhra Pradesh.
“In the next two years, we hope to set up new centres in 150 small towns across the country.”
“And we are looking at the mobile telephone to deliver our service,” Janakiraman says, adding, “This, we hope, will help us reach out to rural and remote India better”.
India’s mobile subscriber base is expected to be 500 million by 2010, and it may be a good idea to log on to a matrimony site on the mobile.
Janakiraman was a programmer in New Jersey who began a community service site in the late 1990s for non-resident Indians (NRIs). He noticed that one segment of the community service, the matrimony site, was getting a large number of hits, especially from Gujaratis and Tamils.
He realised that online searches for brides and grooms were becoming popular because it solved huge logistics and cost problems.
In 1997 Janakiraman set up bharatmatrimony.com with a database of 4,000 which today holds 12 million profiles.
According to JuxtConsult, a research site for data on online use, “matrimonial search is the second largest gainer among online activities and has increased by 33 percent over the last year (2006)”.
It says about 12 million people undertake an online matrimony search every year and the market is “brand driven”, with four out of five users directly logging on to bharatmatriony.com or shaadi.com.
Bharatmatrimony, for instance, helped arrange 15,000 marriages last year and held 35 percent of the market, linking itself to portals like Sify and Rediff.
Ten years on, Janakiraman says his success lies in “understanding the Indian ethos and tradition”, which led him to create different domains like tamilmatrimony.com, punjabimatrimony.com — as many as 15 regional portals in six languages. The company provides photo protection and employs detective services in 57 cities for verification.
Despite all the checks, an occasional fraud does happen. Last month cyber police in Chennai arrested a man called Liaquat who duped more than 50 women into marriages by promoting himself through several matrimonial sites.
“This case is one in a million. We call up every alliance seeker and verify the personal details”, says V. Mohan, chief of kalyanamaalai.com, adding, “we take all the precautions possible”.
Janakiraman, who thinks the online partner search will only grow, says: “We always insist that families are involved in the negotiations right up to the wedding and even after that.”