Nonetheless, the Internet adoption rate in the country is not something to be proud of. While plenty of people think that the Internet has come of age in India, it needs to be said that it's only growing at 15 to 20 per cent a year. This is not a healthy pace considering our vast population. I would have hoped that by this time we would have had more than 100 million regular Internet users. However, we only have about 30 million. This continues to be a challenge because you can't scale up as fast as your global competitors unless you start to look at other businesses as well.

I think there is a perpetual strain on the supply side of Internet access. On the supply side, companies are so busy supplying mobile phones connections that they don't see a compelling business case to increase the supply of Internet access and broadband connections. Also, there are last-mile connectivity problems. Effective last-mile connectivity options such as Wimax are going to take time to materialize.

On the demand side, people don't really know why they should move to the Internet. That's something the supply side needs to do something about. Unless a consumer understands why he needs access to the Internet in the first place, we will never see an uptake in its adoption.

Was this a problem you tried to solve when you were chairman of Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI)?

At IAMAI, we grappled with the low penetration of Internet in the country. While I was chairman, my agenda was very simple: make the organization as democratic as possible. As a body, the IAMAI had a mix of large, small and individual members. There were competing factions within the association whose interests were not aligned initially. From that perspective, we were quite successful in creating an independent association with a single-minded focus on driving Internet penetration and adoption in India ahead. We strongly believed that if that could be solved, all the other problems related to e-commerce would be resolved.

From new age media to entertainment, the People Group has done it all. How does technology tie it all together?

When we started the websites, technology allowed us to take one user profile and market a service to it. For example, when we started Mauj mobile services, technology allowed the data to be consumer mobile phones. Mauj mobile is powering the mobile side of the business. We saw the opportunity to take Bollywood content to consumers on their mobile phones. As we started to understand that industry, we identified an opportunity to produce films as well. If you ask me how technology is common across all these companies, I'd say that we started these very companies because technological changes afforded us the opportunity.

But, despite this belief in IT, you later backed your online businesses with a brick-and-mortar model.

Frankly, I don't spend time thinking about technology. I spend my time thinking about consumers, their requirements and how we fulfill those. Deploying technology for the sake of technology doesn't make sense to me.

Let's take Shaadi.com. What does the Internet do for the matchmaking business? Basically, the Internet takes away geographical limitations and content-spatial restrictions. This means that one can find a match anywhere in the world and can share plenty of content and data about oneself. It also enables communication in a secure and anonymous fashion, which is not possible via a newspaper or via any other media. Most of all, the Internet is cost-effective and efficient.

But while it offers users these benefits, it also requires them to be at a certain comfort level with the medium. It is not like television. You don't just switch it on. As a result, despite technological benefits, we could only reach a certain faction of the market. Especially because in our country, parents usually take matrimony-related decisions

We had the option of waiting for parents to get comfortable with technology. Or, we could take technology to them. The Shaadi.com Centers, the brick-and-mortar model you refer to, are still driven by technology and powered by the website. All we have done is taken away the complexities involved with technology. Consumers come in for a matchmaking solution and that's exactly what we offer them. Technology remains in the backend and still gives us all the advantages we spoke about. We just extended our technology platform to the Shaadi.com Centers.