Sitting in his office in London in the year 1993, systems analyst Anindyo Sanyal was day-dreaming about doing something ?meaningful? for society. ?Not that I wasn?t successful in my profession or that I didn?t enjoy my work,? he says today, in his office in Calcutta, ?it was just that I wanted to do something not for myself, but for others?. But at the same time, he was, what he terms, ?realistic? enough not to want to delve into anything without making sure that it would give him a sustainable income. ?I wanted to venture into an area that would merge social service with a lucrative income.? After much brainstorming, discussions with colleagues and friends, going through newspaper and magazine reports, he finally decided that it would have to be in the field of marriage counselling. ?This is one area that needed attention, especially in India,? he explains, ?because though marital problems were an undeniable reality, at that time there were few professional counselling centres, which would address this problem?.

Family court judge Gitanath Ganguly, who is executive chairman of marriage-counselling cell Legal Aid Services (LAS), concurs. ?Earlier, there was a ?joint-family? support system that people used to rely on. When that started breaking up, couples experiencing marital problems didn?t know where to turn to for guidance,? he says. ?Professional marriage counselling became a crucial need.?

Interestingly, while this family support system was crumbling, simultaneously, marriages began to experience more stress. Ganguly explains, ?First, directly because of the crumbling support system ? with no parents-in-law around to take care of the baby, for instance, there was more pressure on the parents, who took it out on each other. Then, with changes taking place in society, more and more women became increasing intolerant of what they considered exploitation in marriage.?

Soon after he?d made up his mind, Sanyal packed his bags and left for home, Calcutta. He rented a two-room ground floor apartment in Jadavpur and, with a desk and a couple of chairs as infrastructure, started Relations Marriage Counselling centre. In Calcutta at that time, you could count the number of such professional marriage counselling centres on the fingers of one hand. Eleven years on and you see them popping up all over the place.

If you walk down Rash Behari Avenue, among the shops and showcases jostling for space on the sidewalk, you will see a yellow signboard that reads ?Kornash?. It is so unobtrusive, that you may mistake it for a menu board, the kind which are displayed outside ubiquitous roadside roll shops and other fast food joints across Calcutta. It lists all the things that it does by way of solving ?relationship problems?. One of them, it goes without saying, is marriage counselling. Says Devaleena Ghosh, director of Kornash, ?In this day and age, with spiralling divorce rates, you simply cannot ignore marriage counselling. In fact, in our experience, it is the area that needs a great deal of attention.?

No wonder that now there are close to 30 counselling centres in Calcutta ? including professional and such non-profit organisations as LAS ? of which marriage counselling programmes are an integral part. ?These deal with different aspects of counselling,? explains Ganguly. ?LAS, for instance, provides legal counselling?.

Sanyal?s Relations is doing so well that it has branched out, with offices not just across the country ? Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Pune and Hyderabad ? but in other parts of the world: Philadelphia in the US and Hampstead in England. In fact, it has opened another office in Calcutta (Park Street) itself. While it had started with psycho-counselling, medical-counselling ? involving a panel of doctors, including a homeopathic doctor and a yoga instructor ? soon had to follow. According to Sanyal, ?very often, the marital problems that we deal with relate to medical or physical problems?. Relations has also started marriage placements and pre-marriage counselling. ?The idea is that prevention is better than cure,? he says. ?Recent divorce statistics indicate that in the last one year, out of every 10 marriages six needed professional counselling in order to prevent a break-up. We try and make matches, based on family background.?

What is a sure-fire indication of the demand for such professional marriage counselling centres today is that in spite of what Sanyal himself admits is an ?exorbitant? registration charge ? Rs 8,500 ? couples are flocking to their office. Chandrima Roy, a school teacher, and Rudra Chakraborty, who works for the West Bengal government?s Panchayat and Rural Development programme, who were contemplating a separation after only six months of marriage, for instance, decided to give counselling a shot and turned up at Relations. ?We found the session useful and will come back for more advice,? says Chakraborty. Each month at least 40 to 50 couples visit the Relations office and Kornash gets no less than 10. And as far as pre-marital counselling is concerned, once a match is made and a marriage actually takes place, each individual family dishes out another Rs 8,000 at Relations.

While marriages may indeed be made in heaven, right now, it?s the professional marriage counselling centres that seem to be having a hell of a time!