By @Maryam Dodhy for Techjuice
Usage of technology as an enabler is the way to go forward. If we look around ourselves, we will find a great number of examples where usage of technology has made our lives so much more easier.

Long gone are the days when people had to spend days upon days searching the Bakra Mandi for the perfect animal. Sacrificial animals are being sold online making this task hassle free. However, the concept isn’t entirely new. This practice has been around for a few years now. People have been putting sacrificial animal for sale ads on social media and OLX but on a limited scale. QurbaniOnline is a site specifically geared for this task.

The online sale of animals is expected to rise this year. People at qurbanionline.com say that they sold 67,000 animals in 2013 and 75,000 animals in 2014 and that number is expected to rise up to 100,000 this year. These online sites make purchase easy for those of us scared to hunt markets. Here you are expected to find a goat for about Rs. 23,000 and a cow for a little over 72,000.

Now this article is not focused on the online forums that will help you find the right bakra but rather on why the need has arise for such forums to exist and how Pakistan is gradually moving towards a digital future. If you compare your life now to what it was a decade ago, you’ll probably think our lives have become fast-paced and very technology-oriented. Everything has gone electronic and its catalyst is a sudden boom of technology. Back up a few years, how many laptops (and other smart gadgets) did you have in your house then? How many do you have now? There lies your answer. Everything is a click away. Want to buy some clothes? Visit an online store. Book your appointmentsonline. Plan your wedding online. Order food, maintenance services – and now sacrificial animals for Eid-ul-Azha.

Long story short, we have an online alternative of everything now. Don’t feel like getting out of the house? Order online. And there’s nothing bad about this trend either. If there’s anything it’s doing, it’s making lives easier. So, don’t ask why do we need an online alternative of everything, the question you should be asking is why didn’t we think of this before? The answer is because we weren’t as technology-friendly as we are now. These days, a Pakistani household that has at least one member pursuing higher education will have an abundance of smart gadgets. Naturally, these people will use such websites to make their life easier. This trend will only grow and is a reminder of the fact of how fast Pakistan is moving towards a digital future.

As seen on TV and Newspaper

Buy Your Qurbani Online. It’s That Easy!

Stacks of hay, beaded jewelry stalls and smell of bakras/gayes is in the air. With each passing day, cheering and excitement in the streets is evident. Noticeably, bakra sacrifice trend is over taken by cow or bull sacrifice but then comes a responsibility of performing qurbani, a demonstration of total submission to Allah’s will and command. Indeed a big task of Eid days for men. Welcome to the new genre of shopping, now you don’t have to spend countless exhausting hours or to bargain for the chosen animal. Also, no need for loading animal to finally bring home. All such hassles have got one solution i.e. purchasing online.

Listed below are top websites /online forums where you will get whole details along with real animal pictures.

#1 QurbaniOnline.com
Top website these days, for all those with loads of work or simply refusing to visit mandis. One of the organized site where you can select type of animal, weight and the breed. After that, you will be informed with pricing information. You have two options, either to ask/ refer for bringing the animal home. Or to ask them for sacrifice and send back the meat.

MONEY is flowing fast into the sacrificial animals business, while the growing use of online marketing continues to reshape the market dynamics.

But investors who had spent billions of rupees in advanced booking of animals are not sure if their net return would rise as dramatically as it did in previous years.

The recent ban on the slaughtering of cows and she-goats in Punjab (to ensure faster livestock growth) is being ignored by animal traders on the grounds that it is meant for regular slaughtering, and not during Eid-ul-Azha.

And the Rangers’ ongoing operation in Karachi against criminals and bad elements in political parties has affected the sacrificial animal market in two ways. On one hand, the animal traders are doing business with lesser fear of bhatta (extortion money). But on the other, the local administration’s new-found zeal for implementing the rule of law is making it difficult for the traders to set up temporary markets for sacrificial animals wherever they wish.

Source: Dawn – Qurbani Online[/vc_column_text][vc_message style=”square” message_box_color=”grey” icon_type=”pixelicons” css_animation=”bottom-to-top” icon_pixelicons=”vc_pixel_icon vc_pixel_icon-tick”]

A trader at a leading online portal hopes to sell 100,000 sacrificial animals this year, up from 75,000 last year and 67,000 a year before that

[/vc_message][vc_column_text]Traders are frequenting between Karachi and the rural areas of Sindh or Punjab with greater ease and are bringing in truckloads of sacrificial animals to the city’s main market on Super Highway.

The cut in petroleum prices effective from September 1 has also come as a blessing for them, as they believe that it will help them contain the cost of transporting animals from rural areas to city and town markets.

Meanwhile, the online sale of animals is also expected to rise. People at Qurbanionline.com say they hope to sell 100,000 animals this year, up from 75,000 last year and 67,000 a year before that. People can buy a goat via this online facility for $225 or about Rs23,000 and a cow for $710 (a little over Rs72,000).

The Al-Shaheer Corporation, which owns the Meat One brand, has also offered the facility of qurbani to its customers for Rs22,000 per goat and Rs99,000 per cow. The deal includes the delivery of meat.

Online services for buying sacrificial animals and for participating in collective sacrifices are offered by several other web portals as well. And young investors are also using OLX.com and similar websites to sell animals on a limited scale.

At Karachi’s main market on Super Highway and in some other markets across the city, the prices of goats and sheep of average height and weight ranged between Rs20,000-30,000 and between Rs15,000-Rs25,000 respectively (till last Tuesday). Meanwhile, cows and calves of average height and weight were priced at Rs60,000-Rs100,000.

The welfare arms of political parties and charities have set their rates for goats at Rs15,000-Rs20,000 and for cows and calves at Rs49,000-Rs72,000 depending upon the size and weight of the animals and the places where the collective sacrifice would take place.

“Animal prices for end-buyers may rise further as Eid-ul-Azha gets closer. But investors would earn no big profits this year,” says a Karachi-based livestock broker who booked 300 cows and bulls in Bahawalpur and 300 goats in Tando Adam in the last week of June.

“I made bookings at an average rate of 60,000 per cow or calf and Rs12,000 per goat and the prices also covered the upkeep and grazing charges for three months,” he told this writer. He said half of the total price of all animals was paid at the time of booking and the remaining 50pc is being paid per truckload of animals on their arrival in Karachi.

This investor is expecting a maximum 30pc return on his investment (Rs22.5m paid as 50pc of the total price of animals in June), which works out at 10pc per month. Since the remaining 50pc price would be paid out of the money he is receiving from local traders, the 10pc net monthly return would not be diluted. “But then it’s not too big, as I have earned higher returns in previous years.”

He represents a class of investment-hoppers, charities, once-a-year-formed groups of crowd financers, NGOs, online traders, and the welfare arms of political parties and religious seminaries. They book sacrificial animals several months before Eid-ul-Azha and earn better returns on their investment owing to lower animal prices due to their bulk forward buying.

No credible estimate is available about such investment, but it certainly runs into tens of billions of rupees.

People had spent Rs350-400bn on purchasing sacrificial animals last year, according to a conservative estimate based on the post-Eid collection of hides and skins (7.4m reported by tanneries but close to 10m by other guesstimates). This year, such spending is expected to remain either unchanged or rise modestly, say sources associated with the cattle trade.

Meanwhile, individual animal-selling arguably fetches higher returns because it is at this stage that the animals are categorised not only by their weight and size but also by their breed or looks, with their prices set accordingly.

Published in Dawn, Economic & Business, September 7th, 2015[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/6″][vc_single_image image=”993″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” css_animation=”right-to-left” title=”Aqiqa” link=”/aqiqa-online”][vc_single_image image=”330″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” css_animation=”right-to-left” title=”Qurbani Online”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css_animation=”bottom-to-top”]

As seen on TV and Newspaper

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