Astrology portals do brisk business due to demonetisation

Number of people coming to Ganeshaspeaks.com to seek written reports has gone up by 30%

An unlikely beneficiary of the Centre’s demonetisation move is astrological service providers. Queries, on an average, have gone up 30% since the November 8 announcement to scrap high-value currency notes, say astrological service providers such as Ganeshaspeaks.com and others. Besides being curious about their own future, Indians have suddenly started taking a keen interest in the country’s political and economic future as it stands to impact them directly as well as indirectly. 

Heman Arun Pandit, chief executive officer and managing director of Ganeshaspeaks.com, said that the number of people coming to their portal to seek written reports has gone up by 30%. “From 5,000 queries a month earlier, we are now handling around 6,000 queries a month from people who seek written astrological reports from our website. Also, there has been an 18-25% increase in the number of customers wanting to talk to our astrologers over phone,” he said.  

The number of people wanting to hold personal consultations with leading astrologers associated with Ganeshaspeaks has also seen an increase after the demonetisation move. “We usually do not encourage personal meeting with our astrologers and also the fees are high for such consultations. However, even that has seen a 5-7% increase,” Pandit added.  

Interestingly, while everyone is anxious about their own future, Rohit K Singhania, chief executive officer of iZofy, a one-and-half-year-old numerology and astrological services start-up, said that suddenly people are equally anxious to know about India’s future. 

“We got a lot of queries on whether the demonetisation move would be rolled back, about political situations, even how long Prime Minister Narendra Modi would continue in office. We had posted an article on Modi's strong charts and whether he would remain PM till 2029. 

We got a lot of queries and responses for that,” Singhania said. His website, which usually gets around 400,000 visitors a month, has seen a 40% jump in traffic.  Ahmedabad-headquartered Ganeshaspeaks.com gets around 130 million visits across all its properties, ranging from mobile apps to radio shows, portal, video services etc. Pandit said that going by the queries, apart from the real estate sector, the jewellers are equally worried.

“People now want to know which would be the more secure modes of investment in the future,” he noted. 

Ganeshspeaks had forecast what it calls a 'zero weightage day' around November 9 and 10 as a part of their stock-market predictions. A zero weightage day means extremely volatile market conditions, unpredictable movements due to factors that may or may not be financial in nature, Pandit explained.