Zerodha, an Indian stockbroker founded in 2010, says it has never paid for advertising. “So the only way we could grow was through word of mouth and customer referrals,” its founder Nithin Kamath wrote in 2025.
In January 2025 Inc42 reported that Zerodha had 1.6 crore users and that “30% of its users came via referrals from existing customers.” Kamath has said that referrals stayed steady after the company stopped paying incentives for them.
In July 2015 weavers in Surat’s Sachin industrial area decided “not to do business with merchants who do not provide valid references.” A committee of the Sachin Weavers’ Welfare Association was to cross-verify the merchants’ details.
The same market also shares warnings. In January 2026 the Federation of Surat Trade and Textile Associations announced plans to “publicly name textile distributors defaulting on payments beyond the 180-day credit period,” on a mobile app.
Business Network International, BNI, organizes local chapters whose members pass business referrals to one another. In June 2023 BNI India reported “50,830 members across 1080 chapters in 121 cities.”
By August 2026 it reported more than 75,300 members. BNI announced that India had overtaken the United States as its largest country by membership.
Many Marwari traders from Rajasthan settled in Calcutta. Drawing on Timberg’s history of the community, the researcher Nakatani writes: “The first Marwaris helped others to enter behind them.” They gave newcomers jobs and “opened a living place run on a cooperative basis for newcomers to stay in.”
As a commercial community, Nakatani adds, they “had relatively easy access to credit, information, and manpower from their organization.”
Hukka paani band, stopping someone’s hookah and water, means a complete social boycott. In July 2023 a khap, a village caste council in Haryana, imposed it on nine families for disobeying its order. ThePrint reported that “no villager would speak to them and no shopkeeper would sell them anything.”
Maharashtra has a law that “prohibits social boycott of a person or a group of people by panchayats.” Maharashtra was the first state to pass such a law.
Sifarish means a recommendation. A person with sifarish has someone who has spoken for them. The Rekhta dictionary gives recommendation and intercession as its first meanings. It notes that the word can also mean “undue favour or influence.”
Indian banks used to ask anyone opening an account for an introduction from an existing customer of the bank. Someone the bank already knew had to vouch for the newcomer.
In December 2012 the Reserve Bank of India told banks to stop insisting on it. The requirement, it said, was not mandatory under any of its rules.