Wedding season bonanza: Traders expecting massive surge in business, says CAIT

With record number of weddings lined up this year, the country’s traders and retailers are expecting a major jump in their businesses in the coming weeks. As per an estimate, their business may jump by an impressive 26 per cent over the last wedding season in 2022 to a record high this time.

Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), the apex industry body of traders and retailers in the country, is projecting the overall business for local business community to surge to a high of Rs 4.74 lakh crore. As per traditional calendar, the Hindu wedding season resumed on 23rd November and will continue till the first week of March, 2024.

As per an estimate drawn by CAIT, after consulting with prominent trade bodies of 30 cities across states, which are known as distribution centres, and different stakeholders both in goods & services, it is estimated that around 3.8 million weddings will be solemnised across the country with a massive flow of about Rs 4.74 lakh crores by way of wedding purchases and procurement of various services by the consumers having marriages in their homes. The number is nearly 26 per cent higher than the total wedding season business in the previous season - pegged at Rs 3.75 lakh crore. Last year around 3.2 million weddings took place in the same period.

In the country’s capital, Delhi, more than 4 lakh weddings are expected to take place in this season, which is likely to generate a business of about Rs 1.25 lakh crore. As per estimates, in India, about 7 lakh weddings will be performed with an expense of Rs 3 lakhs each and 8 lakh weddings with Rs 6 lakh each. While about 10 lakh weddings will be incurring an expense of Rs 10 lakh each; 7 lakh weddings with Rs 15 lakh, 5 lakh weddings with Rs 25 lakh. Some 50 thousand weddings with Rs 50 lakh and 50 thousand weddings with an expense of Rs 1 crore or above. 

Lauding the call for avoiding destination wedding by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, CAIT president BC Bhartia said, in a wedding nearly 80 per cent of the expenditure is incurred on both goods and the services.  “Such money when flows into the market enables financial liquidity at the hands of the people and the money gets rotated several times changing hands. Therefore, it helps the economy. Whereas weddings solemnised outside country devoid the nation and the economy to great extent as expenditures are made in foreign land having no benefit for the country,” he said.