Cafes headed towards Cyberia?
PALLAVI PASRICHA
The favourite hangout joints of GenX a few years ago, cyber cafes have fallen from grace now. Is this the end of the cyber cafe culture?
A few years ago, they used to be choc-a-bloc with youngsters who wanted to chat, surf and, if possible, live in the cyber cafes. Today, at the mere mention of the name, any youngster worth his laptop grimaces and says, “How tacky!” Cyber cafes have indeed fallen on bad days and figures are a proof of that. So, while the number of internet users have seen a steady increase from 33 million in March this year to 37 million in September, only 39 per cent of them are using cyber cafes.
So, what made the then hangout joints suddenly fall from grace? “The easy availability of computers and too much of negative publicity that came to surround cyber cafes,” answers Ankit Sharma, a cyber café owner.
Most of the cyber cafes say that walk-ins are down by at least 50 per cent. While plush colonies have seen most of the cyber cafes closing down, the middle-class colonies have seen rates coming down from Rs 75 (for an hour of surfing) a few years ago, to a measly Rs 10 now.
Explains Shekhar Sharma, a cyber café owner in Ber Sarai, “My business has gone down by 50 per cent. I opened the cafe seven years ago. At that time, I used to get 150 to 200 customers daily, but now only 50 or 60 customers come daily.” Cyber cafes around hostel areas and PGs are marginally doing better because students staying there don’t own computers.
And it is not just the stand-alone cyber cafes that are suffering; even big players like Reliance and Sify iway are facing recession. Sify has over 3,300 cafes in the country while Reliance web world has roughly 2,300. Himanshu Sharma, the operations manager of a Reliance outlet says, “We opened the cyber cafe three years back and since then we have lost 15 to 20 per cent of our customers. We basically target students and working people who have to use the internet. We get about 70 to 80 customers daily and 50 per cent of these people come for internet surfing while 25 per cent come for online games.” In fact, online gaming is the new attraction through which cyber cafes are trying to make money.
While this is the case in the metropolitan cities, in smaller towns the business is flourishing. Says Ashish Saboo, president, Association of Public ICT Access Provider — an association of cyber cafes, “In smaller towns, the cyber cafes are doing much better. In these towns, people are slowly becoming aware of the internet and business is flourishing.”
He says that local cafe owners are also running scared because they become a scapegoat if anybody uses their premises to send a threatening mail. While the cafe is raided and consecutively shuts down, the real culprit usually gets away by paying a small fine. The recent threats to the president, prime minister and other prank mails have been sent from cyber cafes.
But to keep a check on this kind of thing, hasn’t the police made it mandatory that nobody can access a computer without showing his identity proof? “With the business so low already, who wants to drive away the users by asking for identity proof?” questions a cafe owner.