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Terms of Service

Version 2026-09-05. Effective 5 September 2026. Last updated 5 September 2026.

These Terms govern access to and use of Riyasat (the “Service”), including the public board, place pages, checkout, and related features. By using the Service, creating a listing, or completing a payment, you agree to these Terms and to the public Rules. Before checkout you must confirm, by ticking a box, that you have read and agree to them. We record that confirmation with a timestamp and the version number above.

If you do not agree, do not use the Service and do not pay for a place.

1. Operator and contact

The Service is operated by Madhusudan Singh, a sole proprietor based in Rajasthan, India (“we”, “us”, “our”). Contact: madhusudansinghlearning@gmail.com.

Grievance Officer. Under the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020, complaints may be sent to madhusudansinghlearning@gmail.com marked for the Grievance Officer. We acknowledge within 48 hours and aim to resolve within 30 days.

These Terms work together with the Rules and the Privacy Policy. If the Rules and these Terms conflict, these Terms control.

2. What the Service is

Riyasat is a paid public ranking. You may pay to list a website against one of thirty-six state crowns or one hundred and thirty-six heritage places, and to hold that place based on the amount staked, according to the Rules.

Listings are paid advertisements. They are not editorial selections, reviews, certifications, endorsements, awards, or independent rankings, and no listing implies that we have checked, approved, or recommend the listed business.

The board can be read two ways. All-time ranks by everything ever staked and does not expire. Today ranks by what was staked in the last twenty-four hours, so a payment counts from the moment it is made and drops out of that view a day later. One payment counts on every view that includes it. Falling out of the Today view is not a loss of anything you bought and creates no refund.

A payment buys a chance to hold a place at the position your stake supports at the moment the payment is fulfilled. It does not buy traffic, clicks, customers, enquiries, revenue, exclusivity, a fixed duration at any position, search-engine ranking, press coverage, or any particular outcome. Anyone may stake more and take the place from you at any time.

3. Eligibility

• You must be at least 18 and able to enter a binding contract.
• If you use the Service for a company, you confirm you are authorised to bind that company, and “you” includes that company.
• You may not use the Service if you are barred from receiving services under the laws of India, the United States, the European Union, or another applicable jurisdiction, including trade and sanctions rules.

4. Payments, taxes, and the merchant of record

Checkout is processed by Dodo Payments, which acts as merchant of record and reseller for the transaction. Their terms and privacy notice also apply to the payment itself. We do not collect or store full payment-card numbers.

Prices on the board are shown in US dollars and exclude tax. Depending on where you are, tax (such as GST or VAT) may be added at checkout by the merchant of record. That tax is not ours and is not part of your stake. The amount that counts toward your stake is the amount that settles to us in US dollars, net of tax.

Amounts, minimums, and the step required to take a place are described in the Rules and shown to you before you pay. Completing checkout is an offer to buy placement on those terms. A place is assigned when payment is confirmed and the stake is written to the board, at whatever position that amount then supports.

Pricing and display errors. If a price, step, position, or total is shown wrongly because of a bug, a data fault, or a manual mistake, it does not bind us. Where an obviously wrong price is displayed we may cancel the affected transaction before or after payment and refund that specific payment in full, or contact you and let you choose to pay the correct amount. A price is obviously wrong when a reasonable person would recognise it as a mistake rather than an offer.

5. Stakes: what your money becomes

This clause describes the central mechanic of the Service. Read it before you pay.

• A payment becomes a stake on one specific place. Your stake on a place is the total of everything you have ever paid toward that place.
• The highest stake holds the place. Where two stakes are equal, the one that reached that amount first holds it.
• Being outbid does not return your money. Your stake stays on that place and continues to count toward taking it back. Only the difference is charged if you later raise it.
• A stake is spent money, not a balance. It is not a deposit, credit, store credit, wallet, prepaid instrument, token, security, or investment. It cannot be withdrawn, cashed out, refunded, transferred to another place, transferred to another person or company, sold, assigned, or exchanged for anything other than position on that one place.
• A stake carries no expiry, and no promise of duration. It confers no ownership of, or right in, any state, monument, heritage site, place name, or anything in the physical world. The board is a game of public ranking and nothing more.
• If your payment settles after someone else has passed you, it still becomes stake on that place. This is not a failed purchase and does not create a refund. You are told this at checkout before you pay.

6. No refunds

All payments are final and non-refundable. Placement is a digital service that begins the moment payment is confirmed: the stake is recorded and shown on the public board.

None of the following creates a refund, a credit, or a claim against us:

• being outbid, immediately or at any time afterwards;
• your payment settling after someone else passed you;
• fewer clicks, visitors, enquiries, sales, or attention than you hoped for;
• a change in the pricing rules, the step, the siege multiplier, or the board layout;
• downtime, slowness, bugs, or errors in the board or its figures;
• a place you dislike, a colour you dislike, or a neighbour on the board you dislike;
• your own listing being removed for breach of these Terms or the Rules;
• you changing your mind, changing your business, or ceasing to trade;
• the Service being discontinued after your payment was fulfilled.

By completing checkout you ask us to begin this digital service immediately and acknowledge that you lose any statutory right of withdrawal or cooling-off period to the extent the law allows that waiver. Where a mandatory consumer right cannot be waived, we honour that right.

We may, entirely at our discretion and without setting a precedent, correct a genuine technical error such as a duplicate charge. That is error correction, not a refund policy, and it does not oblige us to do the same again.

7. Chargebacks

Starting a chargeback, payment dispute, or reversal without a legally required basis is a breach of these Terms. Where that happens we may remove the listing without refund, forfeit the stake, refuse you future use of the Service, and recover from you the disputed amount together with any fees charged to us and reasonable costs of responding.

We keep records to answer disputes: the terms version you accepted, the time you accepted it, a hashed form of your network address, the price quoted to you, the amount settled, and the moment your listing appeared on the board.

8. Your listing, and what you promise

By submitting an address or a payment, you represent and warrant that:

• you own or are authorised to represent the website you list, and to send visitors to it;
• you are not listing a competitor’s website, or impersonating another person, brand, or company;
• the listing and its destination comply with all applicable laws, including advertising, consumer, privacy, data-protection, intellectual-property, and regulated-industry rules;
• the destination is not malware, phishing, a scam, or a site whose main purpose is to deceive;
• the name and description you submit are accurate, and you will keep them accurate;
• the live site displays valid, current details identifying who is legally responsible for it, where the law applying to that site requires it.

9. What you may not list or do

• sexual, pornographic, or adult-platform content; chat, invite, or messaging-group links; link shorteners or redirects used to hide the real destination;
• content that is illegal, fraudulent, defamatory, harassing, hateful, violent, or that exploits children;
• counterfeit goods, unauthorised streaming, or other infringement of others’ rights;
• offers requiring licences you do not hold, including certain financial, medical, gambling, pharmaceutical, or weapons-related offers;
• content that misuses, disparages, or politically appropriates the heritage places, states, or names on the board, or that suggests any official, governmental, or archaeological endorsement;
• interfering with the Service: scraping beyond ordinary browsing, inflating or manipulating click or visitor counts, evading rate limits, automating claims without our written permission, or reverse engineering except where mandatory law allows it;
• manipulating the board: bidding against yourself through another domain, handle, or person to inflate a price or manufacture activity; coordinating with others to create the appearance of a contest; claiming a place you intend to dispute or reverse; or using the board’s figures to mislead investors, customers, or the public about your standing.

Where we believe the board has been manipulated we may reverse the affected positions, forfeit the stakes involved, and remove the listings, without refund.

10. Our right to remove a listing

We may refuse, delay, edit, hide, or permanently remove any listing, name, description, logo, link, or stake, with or without notice, including where we believe these Terms, the Rules, or the law may have been broken; where a rights holder or platform complains; where the destination becomes unsafe or unreachable; or where we think the listing creates legal, security, or reputational risk. Removal does not entitle you to a refund and does not return your stake.

11. Names, logos, and third-party material

To run the board we fetch and display publicly available information about listed destinations: names, titles, descriptions, logos, icons, and Open Graph images. We use that material only to identify the listed business on Riyasat, to show visitors where a paid placement leads, and to operate and moderate the Service. We host copies rather than linking to your servers.

You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, cache, reproduce, resize, format, and publicly display your listing and that public material for as long as needed to operate, promote, and keep an archive of the Service.

State names, heritage place names, and historical material are used descriptively to identify the places on the board. Their use does not imply any association with, or endorsement by, any government body, archaeological authority, or heritage trust.

12. Complaints and rights notices

If you believe a listing infringes your rights or is unlawful, email madhusudansinghlearning@gmail.com with: your name and contact details; the listing on Riyasat; the destination address; a description of the problem; and a statement that the notice is accurate and that you are the rights holder or authorised to act. We may remove or restrict a listing while we review a notice.

13. No endorsement, no earnings claims

Appearance on the board is not our opinion of a business. We do not verify that listed companies, their claims, prices, or results are true. Click and visitor counts describe what our systems recorded; they are not a promise that you will get the same. Your results depend on your position, your destination, timing, and factors outside our control.

Links leave Riyasat. Those destinations have their own terms and practices, and we are not responsible for them.

14. Availability and changes

The Service is provided as is. It may be unavailable, slow, or wrong. We may change the pricing rules, the step, the siege multiplier, the places on the board, the layout, or these Terms. Where a change is material we will update the version and date at the top of this page.

For a payment already completed, the version you accepted at checkout governs that payment, except where a change is required by law or needed to address a security or legal risk. Continued use after a change means you accept the new Terms.

If we close the Service we will give reasonable notice on the board where we can. Closure does not refund completed payments or return stakes, and we may keep or publish an archive of the final standings. Placement is bought for the position it gave at the time, not for any promised future duration.

15. Disclaimers

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, or that listings, names, images, positions, prices, or counts are accurate or complete.

16. Limitation of liability

Nothing here limits liability that applicable law says cannot be limited, including for fraud, wilful misconduct, gross negligence, or death or personal injury caused by negligence. Subject to that:

• we are not liable for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, lost goodwill, business interruption, substitute services, or any indirect, incidental, special, punitive, or consequential damages;
• our total liability for any claim relating to a payment is limited to the amount you paid us for the listing that the claim concerns in the three months before the claim.

17. Indemnity

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Madhusudan Singh and anyone working on the Service from claims, damages, losses, and reasonable legal costs arising out of your listing, your destination site, your payment or chargeback, your breach of these Terms, or your infringement of anyone’s rights. We may take over the defence of a claim; you will cooperate.

18. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of India, excluding conflict-of-law rules. Subject to any mandatory consumer protection that applies where you live, the courts having jurisdiction in Rajasthan, India have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service. If you are a consumer with a mandatory local law that cannot be displaced, that law still protects you.

19. General

• If any part of these Terms is unenforceable, the rest stays in effect and the invalid part is replaced by the closest valid term to the original intent.
• Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
• You may not assign these Terms without our consent; we may assign them with a transfer of the Service.
• Notices. We may contact you at the email address given at checkout or published on the domain you listed. You agree to receive notices about the Service electronically. Notices to us go to madhusudansinghlearning@gmail.com.
• Events outside our control. We are not liable for failure or delay caused by anything beyond our reasonable control, including outages at our hosting, database, DNS, or payment providers, network failures, denial-of-service attacks, changes in law, or acts of government.
• No partnership. Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, agency, or employment relationship between us.
• These Terms, the Rules, the Privacy Policy, and the checkout details you confirm form the entire agreement for the Service.

Questions before you pay: madhusudansinghlearning@gmail.com.