Edit: Apparently in India, women give dowries to men, which is insane. Imagine paying Indian men to marry you. An Indian man must've come up with that. Anyways, apparently some of the more intelligent Indian women who are able to secure medical residency spots, often
sell them as dowries to Indian men.
Dowries are, by definition, paid to men. The word for the other way around is "bride price." The woman also doesn't pay the dowry - her family does.
They're intended to help get the new couple to a good point financially or provide some kind of money that can be given back to the wife in the event that she's widowed. It's not really that strange of a practice, it's just that we haven't done anything like it since the days before Christianity.
As for the reason - when you live in a pre-modern agrarian society with multiple generations living in a single household, the additional utility of a new woman is low. A new wife can't really do the backbreaking farm work and all the "woman's work" (cooking, cleaning, weaving, etc) is often already being fulfilled by an endless parade of mothers, grandmothers, and aunties. So you have to "sweeten the deal" to convince the man's household to take the woman in.
It's extremely backwards and regressive and there's a reason why western civilization abandoned it more than a thousand years ago.
I don't want them here but it's deeply retarded to think that societies like, say, Singapore or Indonesia or the Philipines are as utterly ruinous and dysfunctional as India.
I've been to homes occupied by FOB Filipinos with modest middle-class professions, and they were largely clean and the occupants were well behaved.
I've been to homes occupied by Indians with multiple six-figure incomes and it was a fucking pig sty and the occupants were rude and belligerent.
prominently features a jeet call center, though they were servicing a company in Scotland, IIRC.
