New Delhi: Last September, Delhi-based software engineer Mohammed Ashfaq, 27, began his online search for a potential bride. He made profiles on matrimonial portals such as JeevanSathi and Shaadi.com. And then, on the advice of a friend, he added his profile to an up-and-coming platform just for Muslims, Nikah Forever. That’s where he found a match, and eventually got married to her – Ashfaq is not comfortable sharing his wife’s name – in her home town of Ambikapur, Chhattisgarh, earlier this month.
“I contacted some profiles on JeevanSathi and Shaadi.com, but didn’t receive any response. They didn’t recommend any good profiles to me,” Ashfaq told ThePrint. “Nikah Forever didn’t just make quality recommendations, but acted as a mediator. It helped me find my wife.”
Nikah Forever was launched in 2018 by 26-year-old tech entrepreneur and Jamia Hamdard alum Hammad Rahman. It claims to be India’s largest Muslim matrimonial website and app, with over 75,000 users and 15,400 success stories (7,700 couples).
However, the online matchmaking industry is dominated by players like Shaadi.com that have been around for over two decades, and claim to have “touched the lives of 35 million people all over the world”.
Muslims in India that ThePrint spoke to said they have lost confidence in the established matrimonial sites, because they don’t feel well represented there. This despite the fact that these sites have great success stories and numbers to report on their portals.
Speaking to ThePrint, Aishwarya Nayak, senior adviser, Shaadi.com, said, “Every member on our portal is important to us. We contact a new user within 24-48 hours of registration to ask what their preferences are and whether they want membership. We always work to improve our services.”
Also read: Opinionated, on Twitter and from LSR, JNU? Good luck in India’s shaadi bazaar
‘Lost confidence’
India’s online matchmaking industry is expected to grow at 25.1 per cent, from nearly Rs 43.5 crore in 2020, to Rs 106.5 crore by 2024. About six to seven million people are active on online matchmaking sites at any given time in India, of which 20 per cent find a match, BharatMatrimony founder and MD Murugavel Janakiraman has been quoted as saying in a newspaper interview.
The market is dominated by players like BharatMatrimony, JeevanSathi and Shaadi.com.
For the Muslim community, these websites offer filters for religion and caste, or separate domains. For example, Muslim Sangam is an extension of Shaadi.com and boasts of “40,000 Muslim Happy Stories”. There are also state-specific websites, like Nikah Matrimonial in Uttar Pradesh, SabaOnline in Bihar and Karnataka Nikah.
“But the dominant sites have lost the confidence of the Muslim community. Their marketing doesn’t adequately target them,” Nikah Forever founder Rahman told ThePrint. “For example, Ramadan is on. They haven’t done any social campaign for it.”
Meanwhile, Nikah Forever has been following a basic social media campaign ahead of Ramadan, by posting excerpts from the Quran.
According to Rahman, 60 per cent of the profiles on Nikah Forever are self-made, while 40 per cent are made by parents, siblings and friends of those seeking to get married.
Speaking to ThePrint, Aliya Khatun, assistant professor, Mathura PG College in Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, said: “When I was looking to set up a profile for my sister Samina, friends had warned me about unresponsive and inauthentic profiles on major websites. So I stayed away from them and opted for Nikah Forever.”
The female privacy tool was also very helpful, she added, referring to an option for women on Nikah Forever to decide whether they want their profile picture to be visible or not.
Meanwhile, 29-year-old Mohammad Saquib from Lucknow, who secured his match last month and plans to tie the knot after Eid, said membership plans on Nikah Forever are more reasonable than on other websites.
“In February, I bought Nikah Forever’s three-month gold membership, which allows you to call and message profiles, rather than just view them. It was a very nominal cost of about Rs 2,700 and at the time they were running a special offer, so I had to pay even less. A month later, I matched with Sameera, my wife-to-be,” Saquib said.
Comparatively, the cheapest membership plan on Shaadi.com starts at Rs 4,850, while the most expensive is Rs 1.7 lakh, a company spokesperson told ThePrint.
Expansion plan
This January, Nikah Forever expanded operations to the UAE, to tap into the 30-40 per cent expatriate population, consisting of Indians and Pakistanis. The website has got about a thousand registrations and 30-40 successful matches from the UAE so far.
According to Rahman, 10 per cent of the expatriate population in the country tends to look for marriage.
The company also plans to expand to Malaysia, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
Also read: India’s Zoom wedding experiment fizzled out. It didn’t have that four-day hangover
Responsibility of privacy and confidentiality of the information will not miss use. important like anything…
Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists and others have no issues with the “established” match making websites. But Muslims feel “under-represented”. They need to have a site of their own, just like they needed a nation of their own back in 1947.
This article is a perfect example of bash the majority and appease the minority.
Only at The Print.
Not sure why on earth we should celebrate websites pandering exclusively to a religious group or caste group! Ironically, the so-called progressives who shudder at the sight of caste specific matrimonial sites(rightly so, for a change) go gung-ho over a Religious community-specific portal.