How the pandemic is changing India’s wedding business

INDIAN NUPTIALSDJKPMG can be garish affairs. The groom often rides to the venue on a horse, or a Royal Enfield motorcycle. Portable sets, fired up by car batteries, blare out Bollywood hits. Traffic on busy streets is routinely blocked to accommodate wedding processions. Matrimony in India is also big business. , a consultancy, estimates the wedding industry’s revenues at roughly $50bn. Before the pandemic these were growing by 25% a year.As elsewhere, covid-19 has forced many Indian couples to postpone tying the knot. It may also have changed the way they go about it. With big weddings on hold because of their superspreader potential, many informal caterers, coconut-water sellers, ice-cream shops, wedding-card printers and flower vendors are struggling as weddings are put off. Online services, by contrast, are thriving. Matrimony.com, one of the biggest, has reported a rise in revenues of at least 20%, year on year, in each of its past four quarters. Shaadi.com, among the oldest such sites in India, has seen a jump in subscribers. And wedding platforms that help families to organise and even conduct weddings online are popping up.