An Uber for pandits, Zomato for prasad delivery, Skype for live funerals, baptisms and communions—tech entrepreneurs are taking the online route to India’s $40 billion call to prayer.
Ruchika Kohli, a 44-year-old marketing director based in California, logged in to Skype in the wee hours not to speak with a friend or relative in another time zone, but to have a puja performed for her, virtually, by pandits in India.
“Growing up in India, pujas were a big part of my life,” she says. “But I never learnt how to do them myself. It was difficult to find a pandit and samagri [items required for a puja] in the US, so I had given up on the idea, until I heard of Shubhpuja.”
Shubhpuja is an online destination for Vedic practices, set up in 2013 by former mergers and acquisitions consultant Saumyaa Vardhan. The portal has a network of verified pandits in India, and has them perform pujas over Skype. So when Kohli booked her puja—and she has used the service five times since—an auspicious time was calculated for her in Indian Standard Time, and she received a kit with items she would need through the ritual.
“At various points, the pandits asked me to get involved—pour rice here, make a tika there,” says Kohli. “It transported me right back to my family home back in India, when my father would perform the rituals.”
When Shubhpuja started out five years ago, it was one of the first such services, aiming to add a touch of tech convenience to religion. Now, the market landscape has changed. India’s tech-religious industry is estimated to be worth $40 billion, according to market research firm Gartner, and technology entrepreneurs are beginning to see large potential in the massive, mostly unorganised sector.
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