match-making mart: Pakistani actor Nirma at a Bride and Groom jewellery and watch show in New Delhi where over 150 exhibitors from India and Pakistan participated. File picture

Hyderabad, Aug. 27: Your daughter is happily married. You have just found the perfect match for your son. Thinking of making a trip to the neighbourhood temple?

How about a thank-you visit to another place? One inhabited by flesh-and-blood characters, not figures of clay.

An ISO-9001-2000 certification for a wedding bureau in the Andhra Pradesh capital has shown that marriages are being increasingly made on earth, with specialists helping you choose the right partner for your son or daughter.

The choice of the groom or bride is just the first step. The bureau ? nearly 20,000 operate across the country ? is there till the last wedding guests have taken their leave after a sumptuous feast. From the decorator to the drummer to the caterer, everyone is available, though for a price.

The business of arranging marriages is a growing enterprise in the country involving thousands of crores of rupees. A fairly accurate guess would be Rs 50,000 crore.

For Andhra, which accounts for about 25 lakh weddings of the 10 million that take place every year in the country, the figure would be anything between Rs 8,000 crore and Rs 10,000 crore, says Yelamanchihili Chiranjeevi, whose organisation has won the ISO certification. In Hyderabad, where three lakh weddings take place every year, 15,000 people are involved in the business.

“We have a classified database for over one lakh prospective brides and grooms,” says Chiranjeevi, the managing-director of Kakateeya Marriages Pvt. Ltd, which has 25 branches spread over Andhra, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka besides Europe and the US.

The certificate, which should help the bureau get NRI clients, has been given by ICL Certification Ltd, an international agency, for quality services and maintenance of records. “We are the first but I think at least another half a dozen wedding bureaus are also lined up for the certification,” Chiranjeevi says.

Arranging weddings is a lucrative job. V.K. Reddy, a marriage bureau operator in Hyderabad, recalls how a former MP splurged on his daughter’s wedding. “He spent over Rs 5 lakh on just the return gifts given to those who attended the wedding at a five-star hotel in Hyderabad,” Reddy says.

“It’s a niche market,” says analyst D. Ramachandran. “Almost Rs 3,000 crore is spent on food and beverages and Rs 3,000 crore on textiles and jewellery in Andhra.” Other services include fixing halls, printing invites and arranging security.

Chiranjeevi says the high failure rate of online weddings drives the cautious middle class to marriage bureaus. According to him, nearly 70 per cent of weddings finalised on the basis of web data has not been successful.

P.N. Rao, of Vanaja Rao Quick Marriages Ltd, which runs a roaring business from 18 branches in south India, lists the reasons for the success of weddings arranged by bureaus. “Personal attention, face-to-face interaction and detailed inputs on economic status, social links and educational standards are scrutinised by us with the help of specialised agencies,” says Rao.

But Chiranjeevi is modest about his company’s success. “This is the world’s oldest profession and nobody can, even websites, replace the players who include your neighbourhood elders,” he says.