Venkatesh Iyer
Bengaluru: One need not be physically present at a funeral or cremation. Just pay tributes to the departed soul online.
This became trendy during the lockdown when restrictions limited the presence of mourners to just 20 in a funeral or burial service.
A digital obituary platform, set up by Pan-India Internet Pvt Ltd (PIIPL), facilitates offering an online solution the problems faced by those who want to pay tributes to a departed soul. The five-year-old company’s portals www.tributes.in in English language and www.shraddhanjali.com in Hindi, became more visible in recent months.
The interface offers a mobile-friendly service and lets users create an obituary using a smartphone. The bereaved kin can post an obituary in any of the two languages.
The platform also provides an annual reminder service via SMS or through emails. It helps the people remember, communicate, and share memories, and the sacramental specifics, besides a life-long profile page of a person.
When social distancing set in during the global pandemic of COVID-19, popularity of this company, soft-launched in 2015 by Raj Kumar Jalan, suddenly increased four-folds with people realising the importance of virtual platforms. With the near and dear ones facing difficulty in travelling and seeing the last of their loved one, the website became handy to many Indians.
They could now pay tributes to the departed soul by placing a garland, offering flowers, lighting a lamp, incense sticks etc. albeit on a virtual platform in the comforts of their homes.
The deceased person’s profile can be created by paying a fee of Rs. 1,000. Friends and family of the deceased can start posting their condolences and share their memories thereon.
New photos, videos, and written notes are often continuously added to a page created on the location. A loved one’s reminiscences stays on forever in www.tributes.in.
Jalan told Revoi that the idea, conceived in 2010, has attracted many during the lockdown since March 2020 when social-distancing was enforced and most people chose to remain indoors. The number of page views during the period doubled month-on-month.
The website also offers option of creating a family tree, as a record of family ancestry.
The portal offers four life-time packages and has tied-up with a payment gateway like CC Avenues and Instamojo.
A tribute when posted online in either of the two websites is picked up by servers of Indiaonline.in, linked with the district headquarters of the deceased and gets automatically visible on the house page of the local city/town site.
The website provides hyper-local search for different services in India over the phone and online and covers all the Indian states, cities, towns. This website already has 18,000 business listings, and a registered user base of over 1.2 lakhs daily users.
Currently, posting an obituary is free for the first 30 days, and the service is entirely free for the defence forces.
Also read: https://www.revoi.in/more-indian-apps-how-they-are-replacing-banned-chinese-apps/