Bride and Prejudice

ByLaurel Papworth

… is one of my all time favourite movies. The next time I get married (I try to do that every few years) it will be Bollywood style, I swear. From my fave Indian online newsletter, Alootechie. Online matrimony market in India expected to touch Rs 90 croreWhen: 1/10/2007 8:05:04 AMBy Rajesh Barnwal The size…

… is one of my all time favourite movies. The next time I get married (I try to do that every few years) it will be Bollywood style, I swear. From my fave Indian online newsletter, Alootechie.

Online matrimony market in India expected to touch Rs 90 crore
When: 1/10/2007 8:05:04 AM
By Rajesh Barnwal

The size of the online matrimony market in India is expected to grow by more than 50 per cent this fiscal, to touch about Rs 90 crore against the estimated Rs 58 crore in 2005-06.

“Online match-making has assumed industry proportions and is growing at a good pace. It is expected to be worth Rs 90 crore in 2006-07 fiscal,” J Murugavel, CEO, BharatMatrimony.com, has said.

“We expect to register 2.5 million users in 2006-07 as compared to 1.5 million that we registered in 2005-06,” Murugavel has added. According to Murugavel, BharatMatrimony.com’s total registrations over the years have been around nine million.

Shaadi.com’s registrations stood at 6.2 million in 2005-06 and the number is expected to go up to 11 million by the end of 2007-08 fiscal, says Vibhas Mehta, business head, Shaadi.com. According to Mehta, Shaadi.com has a total registration base of 9.1 million.

“We expect to add 12 lakh users by March 2007, averaging to one lakh users registering every month on Jeevansathi.com,” Vivek Khare, business head, JeevanSathi.com, has said.

(Source: Expressindia.com)

Well I had no clue what crore was so I popped over to wiki and checked it out.

A crore (Devanagari: करोड़, Urdu alphabet: کروڑ) is a unit in the Indian numbering system, still widely used in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. It was also used in Iran for many centuries until some decades ago.

An Indian crore is equal to 100 lakhs or 10 million (107). An Iranian crore (کرور (Korur) in Persian) is half a million (500,000).

This system of measurement also introduces separators into numbers in a different place than that which is common outside India. For example, 30 million (3 crores) would be written as 3,00,00,000, with commas at the thousand, lakh, and crore levels, instead of 30,000,000.

The unit is also known as Koti in the Bengali (Bengali: কোটি), Telugu, Kannada, Konkani and Marathi language speaking areas while Kodi (Tamil : கோடி) is used in Tamil and Malayalam.

The Mumbai underworld slang for a crore is a khokha.

OOPS – none the wiser. All those zeroes. 🙁 So I italicised the western numbers. But it looks to me as though RS 90 crore is 900 million Rupees? My favourite converter, XE.COM says that is nearly 26 million Aussie dollars. Cooooool.

BTW there’s a tonne of matrimonial sites in India. I happen to like Shaadi and leave comments there occasionally – as ya do – but there’s more than just those three.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

5 Comments

  2. Get back to the end of the queue! back! back, I say! … Donkey.*

    *Warning: contains Shrek reference.

    hon, is that all you have to say? Nothing about how internet dating is reshaping our society? How to scale a massive community of this nature? Privacy, date rape and abusive behaviour, how do you know the bastards aren’t really married when they say they are looking for romantic love, should you bring along a friend on the first date in case he’s a wierdo or worse… a geek? Whether the cultural challenges of foreign dating services can be dealt with on an international scale? Nothing? Nada? Ah well… *giggles*… I pick j00! 🙂

  4. Merci, Monsieur Benson. I’ve put the book in my basket awaiting my next order (I just ordered a tonne of books last week, so it will be a little while).

    I loved your review Andrea Baker finds that people who participate in online relationships are not desperate, lonely, ugly, sex addicts and child molesters; despite common depictions.

    You are absolutely right.I think people should be aware that the majority of negativity about Web 2.0 phenomena such as social networks and communities, user generated content and citizen journalism comes from traditional media. After all, they are the ones with their you-know-whats on the line. For example, the error rate per 100 articles in Wiki is lower than in Encyclopedia Britannica but that’s hardlyh ever pointed out in the generic “User Generated is Crap” articles. And dissing social networks and dating comes under that umbrella.

    I once went to Melbourne (out of state) to meet a guy from the ‘net. He spent the whole of dinner talking about his ex-girlfriend. Nice guy but we could’ve done that chat on IRC (twas the days before MSN Messenger). Anyway, I found a nice red corduroy jacket in a market there that I still wear to this day. So the trip wasn’t a total loss 🙂

Comments are closed.