With internet and smartphone penetration on the rise in India, the LGBTQ community is increasingly taking to online dating sites to mingle. Already, around 1.4% or 69,000 of the five million users of US gay dating app Grindr and nearly 3% or 92,000 users of German app Planet Romeo’s three million users are in India. [...]
In July 2015, a gay maritime engineer was reportedly lured into a trap through an online dating service. He was attacked and extorted by two men while he was in a hotel room in Mumbai with a man he had met on a dating app. The attackers stole his possessions and emptied his bank account, and threatened to press criminal charges for having sex with a man if he went to the police. [...]
However, app-makers say they have put checks and balances such as verifying user identities and limiting app permissions online. Grindr, for instance, now has discreet icons that let users camouflage the app on their phones. But since homosexuality largely remains a taboo in India, it can still be hard to convince someone you meet online to take the next logical step offline. Some new apps are now finding a fix for just that. [...]
Twenty-seven-year-old Ishaan Sethi launched an app called Delta this April. The platform brings together like-minded individuals who can establish any relationship—friends, romantic partners, mentor-mentee—with its “Connect” feature.
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