In the first quarter of the New Year, media executive and business professional Tarun Katial, who has previously led Zee5 and has also held the position of Big FM’s founder and CEO, will be launching Eve World, a women-only platform to facilitate expression, creation and community building. “After two decades of working for content around and for women, I was keen to use technology that would enable them and their entertainment options,” he says. But while the germ of the idea took root in the course of his professional experiences, a more personal incident gave it momentum. His wife Monisha Singh Katial got trolled on WhatsApp in April 2021. It was the motivation to launch Eve World, with co-founders Aparna Acharekar who will be responsible for building the content and community verticals, and Rajneel Kumar who will lead the product, technology and growth verticals. Moreover, he points out that while only one per cent of users are creators, there is a big percentage of women with strong opinions online who shy away from voicing their concerns anticipating relentless harassment.

What necessitated such a platform, says Katial, was the fact that while technology and creative tools have empowered women recently, it has come with the baggage of gender discrimination due to the anonymity accorded by the digital realm. Recommendation engines and moderation pipelines of existing social media platforms have been unable to control this. Added to this is the lack of safe, closed communities, and the dearth of support of micro entrepreneurship for women. Content, community and commerce are his platform’s buzzwords, service and social commerce in terms of one-on-one, recorded and live consults holding the promise of financial independence and better monetisation ability. “There was a need for a content community-cum-commerce platform for women,” he thinks, “a free space for women, of women and by women, built around creative and community tools because community is an even stronger need for women when they must deal with issues of health, hygiene, premarital sex, and workplace harassment”.