Finding a spouse has always been a lottery in India, where dating - let alone premarital sex - is frowned on and 95 per cent of all marriages are still arranged.

Mrinalini Das, a 27-year-old fashion designer from Delhi, has, however, found a way to improve her odds by several thousand per cent.

Like many middle-class Indian women, when she reached her mid-twenties she succumbed to her parents’ nagging and asked them to find a suitable partner. They spread the word and soon she had a dozen resumés that detailed her suitors’ age, height, caste, education and religion.

“None were exciting enough for me,” Ms Das told The Times. “But I’m no good at asking out guys at the gym and not very comfortable if he asks me out for coffee.” So she took a step towards finding love that is being adopted by a growing number of young urban Indians in a rapidly changing, yet still traditional, society.

She has subscribed to Shaadi.com, one of India’s two top matrimonial websites. Suddenly she was not looking at a dozen crumpled resumés but at hundreds of thousands of profiles on the site, which claims to have ten million registered users and 300 million page views per month. For a fee of 1,500 rupees (£18), she could find out more about a potential partner and start a relationship by e-mail or telephone.

“The best part is that it’s not face to face,” she said. “You can get to know the guy before bringing in the families.”

Sixty years after India won its independence, its society remains deeply conservative – and never more so than when it comes to marriage. In villages girls are often married off before reaching puberty. Even in cities couples generally meet once before they are engaged.

A recent survey by the magazine Outlook found that 61 per cent of young Indians disapproved of sex before marriage and 40 per cent would prefer to marry within their own caste and state. For young, middle-class Indians, though, Shaadi and its competitor, Bharatmatrimony. com, are changing the concept of the arranged marriage - and turning it into a multimillion-dollar business.

Apunam Mittal, founder and chief executive of Shaadi, said that he got the idea in Bombay in 1997 when he met a traditional matchmaker who made his living carrying around a sheaf of CVs. “As I spoke to him, it became evident that people’s choice was limited by how much weight he could carry and how far he could travel,” Mr Mittal, 34, said.

He started the company in 1997 but it did not take off until 2003, when he gave up his job in the United States and returned to his native Bombay. Today Shaadi (which means marriage in Hindi) claims more than 800,000 success stories and 6,000 new profiles every day - about 60 per cent male and 40 per cent female.

While its first clients were mostly from the Indian diaspora, including communities in Britain, 70 per cent are now from India.“We give these people greater choice and the ability to transcend geography, community and religion,” Mr Mittal said. He estimates that India’s matrimony market is worth £10 billion - of which £150 million is spent on matchmaking. With less than 5 per cent of India’s population online, there is plenty of room for growth.

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