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Hello, welcome to assignment on BBC World Service.

I'm Ed Butler and today you find me in a car

traveling through thick traffic in downtown Delhi.

I'm on my way to an unspecified destination

to find out whether a young man,

shortly to be married, is everything he claims to be.

I'm going undercover with one of India's wedding detectives.

We are going to check whether the person has

any kind of drinking habits, smoking habits.

So if this guy's a drinker, the wedding's off.

If he's a daily rinker, then obviously they will think about the wedding.

As the traditional Indian wedding season reaches its climax this month,

tens of thousands of people it's thought more than ever before,

a secretly hiring private detectives

to spy on future brides and grooms before they tie the knot.

Maybe it's a sign of the times or maybe you'd call it a sensible precaution,

but middle-class India, it seems, has developed a suspicious bend.

And in this edition of assignment, I aim to find out why.

Your family values are conservative, moderately.

...