MUMBAI: It is not the coffee that draws Neville d'Souza to a coffee shop in Mumbai. It's the chance to cuddle his girlfriend.

"She isn't allowed outside at night. This is the ideal place to meet her during the day," the 22-year-old engineering student said, as he waited for his friend at an outlet of the Barista coffee chain.

"With a similar age-group crowd around, you can comfortably get cosy because no one's looking at you. These places are a boon for people who are in love."

The cafes are a boon too for growing Indian chains that have caught a liberal wave of changing social habits in a land more known for its tea drinkers. The absence, for the moment, of global competitor Starbucks has also helped.

Barista and rivals Cafe Coffee Day and Javagreen attract young people with good jobs and cash in their pockets, at a time when many traditional meeting places have been demolished to make way for new buildings in India's fast-growing cities.

From a handful of outlets six years ago, the three big chains have nearly 600 outlets between them, and plan many more.

Cafe Coffee Day is the oldest brand in the market. It has mushroomed to 288 outlets from just seven in 2000 - and wants to expand to 500.

Social change has helped Cafe Coffee Day, but so has lingering conservatism in a country where the young can escape the stern gaze of parents to a cafe but meeting in a bar is frowned upon.

"Hanging out with friends in a drinking place is never going to be as socially accepted as hanging out in a non-drinking place," said Sudipta Sengupta, Cafe Coffee Day's senior general manager of marketing.

Bangalore-based Cafe Coffee Day is just 10 years old but it has international dreams. It has opened a branch in Vienna, at the heart of Austria's cafe culture.

Young Indians seem happy to buy coffee at upwards of 40 rupees a cup (90 US cents), rather than tea from a street trader for as little as two rupees (4 US cents).

Barista, which opened in 2000 with the aim of attracting upmarket coffee drinkers, plans to nearly double its chain to 250 outlets in India by early next year.

It is fun rather than caffeine that drives Ruhie Kumar, a 20-year-old student, to Barista in Mumbai.

"I don't like coffee that much but I like to hang out with my pals," she said, sitting with her friends, sipping a smoothie.

"It's an ideal place to flirt, date, discuss things and - most importantly - chill out."

Young spenders like Kumar attracted Reliance Infocomm to the sector. It hosts 125 Javagreen outlets in its telephone and Internet shops, hoping the aroma is good for business.

Javagreen Chief Operating Officer K.R. Chandrasekaran wants to expand beyond telephone shops to 400 to 500 outlets within a few years but the vision of the Indian firms may be countered by Starbucks Corp.

India and Italy are the only economies among the world's 12 largest without a Starbucks but that may be about to change.

A company spokeswoman said the Seattle-based retailer planned to enter South Asia within 18 months.

Chandrasekaran said the global rival could arrive in India as early as this year, perhaps through a tie-up with a local retailer such as Shopper's Stop.

Chandrasekaran expressed no fear of the huge rival, despite accusations from anti-corporate activists that Starbucks smothers local competitors.

"They will raise the profile of cafes. They will make it a little bit more aspirational," he said, adding that Starbucks might find it challenging to sell the high-margin food seen in its outlets elsewhere in the world.

Satellite television is credited with introducing young Indians to the cafe culture. When growing up in the 1980s in Calcutta, now known as Kolkata, Sengupta said she and her friends "didn't know what 'hanging out' was".

The cocoon fell away with the arrival of foreign TV shows. At the same time multinationals began hiring educated, tech-savvy Indians to write software and do back-office work and the government began freeing up the economy.

These moves opened the way to profound social change among a generation that increasingly prefers to sip lattes, rather than scan newspaper advertisements for arranged marriages.

"We don't have enough food to eat, but we all watch TV. And we talk on the mobiles," Sengupta said of her country of more than 1 billion people, which has more than 100 million TVs and nearly as many mobile phones.

"The young generation has really absorbed it. Now they look as if they've been born with a mobile phone and a laptop in their hand."

No longer content to meet under the watchful eye of parents or in school canteens, young people sought somewhere new, and Cafe Coffee Day was the beneficiary of that, Sengupta said. An old-style coffee house was not attractive.

"It wasn't hip at all. It was a preserve of leftist thinking, poetry-spouting people," Sengupta said.

"We just happened with the solution at the right time. It just so happened that it was coffee."

"It could have been something else."-Reuters