Now marriage market dumps software engineers in India

by Sanjay Jha | November 26, 2008 at 12:10 am

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Majority of young boys and girls in India are married by their family by what they call it "arrange marriage". There is always big demand of professional bridegrooms in marriage market. Boys working in new economy business were most preferred choice of any girls father. Indian society also badly suffers from the custom of dowry and in some community rates for these professionals are quite high. Software engineers were commanding big premium but economic slowdown has affected them in the marriage market.

Software engineers, once the blue-eyed boys of Andhra Pradesh, are suddenly finding themselves out in the cold. With BPOs, software firms and IT majors handing out pink slips or asking employees to proceed on unpaid or half-salary leave for six months to one year, the techies are being dropped like hot potatoes.

Banks, which vigorously pursued them with offers of loans and credit cards till last month, were the first to dump them. And now Andhra’s famed marriage bureaus have followed, with prospective brides ticking off software engineers. In some cases, weddings have been postponed till things improve. This is a drastic change from a time, not so long back, when parents were willing to give up to Rs 40 lakh dowry to get a software engineer as son-in-law.
“Just as software engineers dread Fridays (usually the day they are asked to quit), parents of prospective brides are dreading proposals from software engineers,” chuckles Nageshwara Rao Gullapalli of Saptapadi Marriage Bureau. “Many parents specifically ask us to ignore bio-data of software professionals. Many girls who come to our bureau to drop their biodatas also ask us to leave software professionals aside.”
Rama Devi, the proprietor of Kakateeya Marriage Bureau, confirms the change in Andhra’s marriage market. “Inquiries about software engineers have drastically gone down in the past three or four months. If there is a good match, parents want us to do a thorough background check on the boy, his job security and the firm he is working in, which we don’t take up. Mostly, biodatas of software engineers are put aside. People used to blindly accept proposals from software engineers till a few months ago.”