Sanjay Singh's business is flourishing.
It's a social service, says the 51-year-old Indian about his work.
In 2024, Singh's detective agency handled hundreds of cases ahead of upcoming weddings, he claims.
Bhavna Paliwal, who started her detective agency over 20 years ago, also says that business is better than ever. From a discreet office in a shopping center in Delhi, she makes judgments about the suitability of prospective brides and grooms.
In one of the latest cases, she discovered that the prospective groom earned a tenth of what he claimed.
The man said he earned around $70,700 a year. We discovered that he actually earned $7,070, says Paliwal.
Thousands of kronor
To aid her in her work, she has high-tech equipment: GPS trackers for cars, small portable spy cameras, and audio and video recorders that can be hidden in everyday objects.
Paliwal, however, does not think that technology or detectives should be blamed for young couples breaking up after, for example, infidelity is revealed.
Such relationships would not have lasted long anyway, she says.
Often, it is the parents of the young couple who pay for the services. It can cost anything from the equivalent of a thousand kronor to over 20,000 kronor, depending on how much surveillance is required. But weddings for the Indian middle and upper classes are rarely cheap – for many, investing in a private detective is a drop in the ocean.
Questions about sexuality
When Delhi resident Sheela's daughter announced that she wanted to marry her boyfriend, her mother didn't call a priest or a wedding coordinator. She called Bhavna Paliwal.
I had a bad marriage. When my daughter said she was in love, I wanted to support her – but not without a thorough investigation, says Sheela, who doesn't want to give her real name: her daughter doesn't know that her mother paid to have the boyfriend under surveillance.
Private detective Akriti Khatri in Delhi claims that around a quarter of her assignments are now "wedding checks" and gives more examples of the concerns customers may have before the wedding.
There are those who want to know if the groom is actually gay, she says.
