Aadarsh and Siddhant (Sanat Kumar Sinha)

The three sites Calcutta’s Netizens clicked on the most this year, according to Google, were Calcutta Telephones, the list of colleges in West Bengal, and Induna.com.

Induna what?

An online shop for DVDs, VCDs and audio CDs developed by Aadarsh Agarwal and Siddhant Agarwal.

If Brothers Agarwalla of south Calcutta developed online word game Scrabulous and took Facebook by storm, the Brothers Agarwal of Howrah have opened online shop Induna.com to get the city Google-ing more than ever.

Induna.com, developed 14 months ago by Aadarsh, 37, and Siddhant, 34, has clicked its way into Google’s Zeitgeist 2008 report, the annual compilation of “the fastest rising and highest volume searches” conducted by Google’s users.

“We had a feeling from the traffic — close to 55,000 hits a day — but we didn’t think it would be this big,” says elder brother Aadarsh.

The boys from Don Bosco Liluah and Bhawanipur College (B.Com Hons) who operate out of their parents’ home in Howrah, are always at work but still manage to watch at least one movie a day! It is from this passion of cinema that a sound business model was born, far removed from the family business of steel warehousing.

“We have been avid movie watchers and we spent an insane amount of time on the Internet, so we wanted to do something in the online space with movies. The idea of selling DVDs online might not seem novel, but we knew we had a winner. We, by our own experience of buying movies online in India, knew the dismal state of affairs in this sphere. We realised there was so much potential,” says younger sibling Siddhant.

Launched on October 21, 2007, the website has close to 5,000 titles with 400 being added every month. “Till now we have focussed on Hindi and Bengali movies. We have just started procuring DVDs and VCDs in Bhojpuri. There are 6,000-plus artistes (actors, actresses, directors, singers...) credited on the site,” says Aadarsh.

The siblings are self-funded, having invested Rs 30 lakh in this project so far. They started making profits “after four months” of launching the website.

From Malda to the Maldives, the demand is growing for the 24-hour-delivery shop. “Forty per cent of our orders come from India with the top cities being Mumbai, Delhi and Kerala; 60 per cent demand is from abroad, mainly from the US, UK and Germany,” says Siddhant.

Where do the brothers and their cinema shop go from here? “We foresee a 300 per cent increase in website traffic and sales by the end of 2009. We hope to move to a bigger facility in Calcutta and create a passionate team working under one roof,” conclude the brothers.