Whenever Gul Panag hears a song from the film Dum, she reaches for her mobile phone. That's because the former Miss India-turned-actor has the Babujee item number as her mobile ringtone. "It is a little over the top, but people just roll their eyes when my phone rings." Ask Imran Shaikh, a web designer who is frantically searching for the "Lifebuoy jingle". "It makes heads turn," says the 23-year-old Shaikh.

For many of the lakhs of Indians who join India's booming mobile phone club every month-it numbers two crore currently-a mobile that doesn't have a unique ringtone is not a mobile. Handsets are no longer the differentiators. Ringtones are. From Tauba, tumhare ye ishare to Kaanta laga to the Ketchup Song to Shah Rukh Khan's voice exhorting "Tum jab tak nahin uthaogi, main yoonhi bajta rahoonga" in Darr style, mobile phones don't just ring anymore. They talk, even sing-complete with stereophonic or polyphonic sound effects.

TOP 10 RINGTONES

> Kaanta laga > Chadti jawani meri chaal > Tauba, tumhare yeh ishaare > Suno na suno na > The ketchup song > Kaliyon ka chaman > Pyar mein dil pe maar goli > Dil to pagal hai > Chura liya hai tumne > Saathiya

"The ringtone is a funny animal," says Balu Nayar, head of value-added services, Hutchison. "A mobile phone was never meant for this, but ringtones seem to have become a symbol of individuality for mobile-phone users." If you hate your boss, download a dog's bark as the ringtone for calls coming from him. Love your wife? Her mobile's ringtone can be the profession of your love whenever you call her. Soon, music CDs and mobile ringtones will be released simultaneously.

The desire to be different in an extremely crowded mobile-phone market has resulted in booming business-for mobile-phone operators, music companies and even composers. In June, an estimated 40 lakh ringtones were downloaded from popular web portals like Yahoo!, Rediff, Phoneytunes, MSN and Indiatimes, among others. The figure is expected to reach one crore a month by the end of the year. At Rs 7-10 per ringtone, that's a lot of money. One estimate says the annual market would be Rs 100 crore by the end of the year.

Encouraged by the response, most mobile operators have ramped up their ringtone businesses by tying up with portals. Hutchison launched the service two years ago through a tie-up with Yahoo! It now records 15 lakh ringtone downloads a month, a number that is growing by 30 per cent every month. "More than 50 per cent of our subscribers have downloaded a ringtone at some point of time," says Nayar. Others like Reliance Infocomm and Bharti Tele-Ventures have come up with innovative ringtones. Reliance has created over 500 ringtones, including multilingual dialogues of Shah Rukh, Dharmendra and the immortal Gabbar Singh of Sholay and sound effects like a car honking or a door creaking. Says Mahesh Prasad, chief of application services group, Reliance Infocomm: "Soon people will be able to record their own voices as ringtones."

Web portals too are gearing up for the deluge. Yahoo! has 10,000 ringtones and Rediff.com, which launched its ringtone library barely two months ago, another 8,000. It is big business because these portals get up to Rs 1.50 for every download. "It is going to explode," says Neville Taraporewalla, director sales and business development, Yahoo! India. Adds Raj Gupta, head of business development at Rediff.com: "Ringtones say something about your personality."

The rush for ringtones has somewhat revived the crumbling music industry. Apart from the music company which has copyright over the album, even composers get a cut from every download, irrespective of whether there is such a contract between the music company and the composer. "We make sure that part of the proceeds go to the composer of the tune as well," says Sanjay Tandon, director general, Indian Performing Rights Society (IPRS), which takes care of intellectual property rights, and is the bridge between the rights holders and portals. In the past six months, iprs, which gets Rs 1.50 for every ringtone download, has distributed Rs 2 crore to music companies and composers.

The key now is to enable subscribers to download ringtones directly without having to go to a portal. Airtel provides such a facility. "Subscribers can download up to 50 ringtones directly on their SIM cards. They can also call and ask for a particular ringtone," says Rohit Bhatia, head of value-added services, Bharti Tele-Ventures. And the future? Perhaps a video clip of the caller on an mms-enabled phone.