The JantaKhoj Story

Welcome to JantaKhoj!

Thanks for visiting our site and for taking time to read this page.

I am sure you must be wondering what it is all about! Okay…first tell me, leaving a cushy job, flashy job title and a fat monthly pay cheque in a nightmare would easily make even the strong amongst us sweat and be glad that it was only a dream, right?

Then why would a sane person give up all these hard earned trappings of a corporate job, and trade in for the all consuming 24/7 entrepreneur’s life? These are the questions I have asked myself often on the frequent bumps of my voluntary flight from the corporate jungle to hop on the roaring, soaring Indian entrepreneurs’ bandwagon.

But, then again, at some point of time or other, like many of you, I have also felt the need to just type in the name of a childhood friend or an old time neighbour or maybe a nearly forgotten relative, in a web search engine and have the power to re-connect with them. Or at least get some information which tells me where they are and what they are doing. But I have realized (a pretty sad realization) that while the regular web search engines are pretty powerful and can crank through a vast amount of information residing on the web, there still remain many online and offline databases which they just do not cover. So, I am yet to find the whereabouts of many of my childhood friends and neighbours.

And with this, I also realized that this challenge becomes even more acute in India, where there is still a long way for the public databases to come online and become accessible to the search engines. Combined with the fact that India has the second largest population in the world, the need for such people search tools becomes even more significant.

At the beginning of 2009, the desire to solve this problem brought Ajit and me into a series of lengthy, expensive phone calls between Silicon Valley and Cyberabad (Hyderabad). Between these two cyber-hotspots, we continued to investigate the people search and background verification tools within India and elsewhere in the world.

The conclusions were pretty clear. While the developed countries had reached a stage where such services were pretty much commodity, there were no practical or reliable tools in the Indian context. We decided to take a shot at building such tools. Over the next months, we had convinced Suresh (our Head-Engineering) and Smitha (our Head-Verifications and Subject Matter Expert) to join hands with us and had a rented room in another software company’s office, to begin the work. We understood that people search is just the beginning of the search process. And that people are looking to learn more deeply about certain individuals which whom they may be about to enter into a business or personal relationship.

And here we are, a year later, with www.JantaKhoj.com in front of you. Give it a good spin. We hope that you will find the site useful and will return to it time and again, as you run into a new person whom you want to look up or as you think of those nearly forgotten folks from your past. Do let us know if you love it or hate it. You can use the feedback form or mail feedback [at] JantaKhoj dot com. Or, if you like to have a more personal interaction, feel free to chat with us on our Website. We look forward to your bouquets or brickbats.

Signing off for now,

Tarun