{"id":10651,"date":"2011-11-21T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-11-21T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2011\/11\/21\/india-s-wedding-detectives-enjoy-booming-trade\/"},"modified":"2011-11-21T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-11-21T12:00:00","slug":"india-s-wedding-detectives-enjoy-booming-trade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2011\/11\/21\/india-s-wedding-detectives-enjoy-booming-trade\/","title":{"rendered":"India&#8217;s &#8216;Wedding Detectives&#8217; Enjoy Booming Trade"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/world-radio-and-tv-15520929\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>MUMBAI, INDIA, November 11, 2011: A growing number of Indians are hiring private detectives to check up on a prospective bride or groom&#8217;s character, sexual history and finances before marriage. Agencies say they&#8217;ve seen a huge rise in pre-matrimonial investigations to check a suitor&#8217;s background, because more people are meeting online and families are less involved.<\/p>\n<p>Pre-matrimonial investigations are increasingly common. There are around 15,000 such companies across India. The private investigation business is not regulated in India. &#8220;It is neither legal nor illegal,&#8221; says Rai, who adds a bill has been going through the Indian parliament for some time in an attempt to create a set of guidelines for the industry.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s not spying, we just wanted to know about my sister&#8217;s boyfriend before she married him,&#8221; says Anita (not her real name). &#8220;Earlier in India with arranged marriages which were set up by the family, relatives would know about a partner, but now you don&#8217;t know if he&#8217;s married or has children or whatever, so we needed to hire someone to check all this,&#8221; says Anita, adding her still-happily-married sister never knew about the detectives.<\/p>\n<p>Anita turned to the services of Veteran Investigations, a Mumbai-based agency which has been carrying out &#8220;pre-matrimonial&#8221; checks for more than 40 years. The vast majority of enquiries come from parents who want to assess the &#8220;character&#8221; of their future son-in-law, says Rahul Rai, who runs the agency.<\/p>\n<p>The nature and scope of investigation depends on the moral or cultural values of parents. Someone from a more traditional Indian family might want to check up on whether a bride or groom drinks or smokes. Others might be keener to learn whether there are any past relationships, something which can still be frowned upon in India. Conducting a review of a groom&#8217;s financial dealings and business assets is also common.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source MUMBAI, INDIA, November 11, 2011: A growing number of Indians are hiring private detectives to check up on a,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10651\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}