Parda is a discreet dating platform for adults in India who are married, attached or separated and are looking for a relationship outside their marriage — and for single adults who are comfortable with that.
Why it exists
Ordinary dating apps are hostile to married people. You are asked for a relationship status and either you lie, which is how this goes badly for everybody, or you tell the truth and spend every conversation defending it. The result is that a very large number of people in India conduct these relationships in the least safe way available: with colleagues, inside their own social circle, on apps built for single people, with people who never agreed to the arrangement.
We think a platform where everybody knows the terms is the safer version of a thing that was going to happen anyway.
What we actually built
- No real names. Your legal name is collected once for the identity check and is never shown to another member. It is not on your profile and it is not in the part of our database that describes you.
- Server-side photo masking. Every photograph gets a masked copy generated on our server, with the detail genuinely destroyed. The clear file is never sent to a browser that has not been given a key by you. A CSS blur can be removed by anybody who opens a developer console; ours cannot.
- Human identity checks. A government photo ID and a live camera selfie, read by a person, on every listing. Not Aadhaar, which a private platform cannot require.
- Contact-stripping in messages. Numbers, emails and handles are removed automatically until you deliberately share one.
- Quick exit and panic blur on every screen, because people use this in rooms with other people in them.
- No payments at all. We do not charge members. Nothing appears on a bank statement because nothing is ever billed.
- Chat only, from a match. A conversation exists only where two people both liked each other, and there are no phone numbers on the platform to reveal.
- Deletion that deletes. Profile, photographs, masked copies, messages, documents. Free, immediate, no retention window.
Two things we will not do
We will not pretend a bot is a person. Every listed profile is a real, ID-checked human. We run AI conversation partners, they are badged “AI” everywhere and they are excluded from every count we publish. Nothing on the platform costs money, so nobody pays to talk to one. Ashley Madison paid a $1.6 million FTC settlement in 2016 for blurring this line. See our AI Disclosure.
We will not become a marketplace. No money moves between members, at all — the platform has no mechanism for it. Nobody here is paid for their company. See the Anti-Trafficking Policy.
How we make money
We do not, yet. There are no plans, no credits for sale, no advertising on the platform and no data sold to anybody. Every part of the service is free.
That is worth being straight about, because "free" in this category usually means the members are the product. They are not: we do not sell data, we hold as little as we can, and there is no advertising network embedded in the app. It also means we have not yet solved how this pays for itself. If that changes, it will be announced on this page before anything changes in the product, and it will not be by charging men to message people who may not be real — which is the model that produced the Ashley Madison bot scandal. See our AI Disclosure.
Is any of this legal?
Yes. Adultery is not a criminal offence in India — the Supreme Court struck down Section 497 IPC in Joseph Shine v. Union of India (2018), and Parliament did not re-enact it in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023. We are an intermediary under the Information Technology Act, 2000 and we operate under the IT Rules, 2021 and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.
What we are not going to tell you is that decriminalisation is the same as no consequences. It remains a ground for divorce under every Indian personal law, and the people affected by it did not get a vote. That is yours to weigh. Our legality explainer is the longer version.
Where we operate
Parda is open anywhere in India. We have written local guides for 71 cities, including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata, with more added every week. We publish honest member counts per city, including zero, because the alternative is selling credits against supply that does not exist.
Who we are
Company registration details will be published here before we accept paid registrations.
Reach us through the contact page, or the Grievance Officer for anything formal.