If you are looking for a list of government-approved recruitment agencies in India, the list you want is the official register of recruiting agents, and it lives on the Ministry of External Affairs eMigrate portal. This page does not reproduce that register. Any copy of it, including the PDFs that circulate in search results, is out of date the moment a licence is granted, suspended or allowed to lapse — and a lapsed licence is exactly the thing you are trying to catch. What follows is how to read the register yourself, what an agent may and may not do, and how the agencies on this site describe their own status.
How we picked
This is a reference page rather than a shortlist. The firms named below were found by researching each company’s own website and recording what it states about its licence; the Veritas rank, which combines moderated reviews, profile completeness, verification status, freshness and demand, decides the order of listings on our directory pages, and sponsors never affect it. We do not verify licences ourselves and nothing here should be read as confirmation that an agency is registered — that check is yours to make on the government portal. Last updated 2 September 2026.
What an RA licence is
Recruitment of Indian workers for employment abroad is regulated under the Emigration Act, 1983. A person or company that recruits for a foreign employer must hold a registration certificate — universally called an RA licence, for recruiting agent — issued by the Protector General of Emigrants in the Ministry of External Affairs. The certificate carries a registration number, a validity period and the name of the registered entity. The number looks something like B-2446/GUJ/PER/100/5/10946/2024: a series letter, a state code, and a running number with the year of issue.
Three things follow from that, and they are the reason the licence matters more than any award or certification an agency advertises.
- An unregistered agent may not lawfully recruit you for a job abroad. Charging you for that service without a licence is an offence, not a technicality.
- A registered agent has posted a bank guarantee with the government, so there is something to recover against if things go wrong. An unregistered one has not.
- What a registered agent may charge an emigrant is capped by the Ministry. The cap is expressed in terms of the worker’s wages with an absolute ceiling, and it is revised from time to time — read the current figure on the eMigrate portal rather than accepting the agent’s account of it.
An RA licence is also not the same thing as an immigration or visa consultancy. A firm may be perfectly legitimate as a study-abroad or visa-processing business and still have no authority to recruit you for a job. Australia’s MARA registration, an ISO certificate, a GST number and a company incorporation number are all real credentials, and none of them is an RA licence.
How to verify an agent on eMigrate
The portal is at emigrate.gov.in and the register of recruiting agents is public — you do not need an account to read it.
- Ask the agency for its registration number and the exact name the licence is held in. Registered names often differ from trading names, so a search for the brand on the shopfront may return nothing while the parent company is listed.
- Search the recruiting-agent register on eMigrate by that name or number, and check three fields: that the entity matches, that the validity date has not passed, and that the state and address are the office you are actually dealing with.
- If the agency will not give you a number, treat the conversation as over. There is no confidential-licence exception.
- Check the employer as well as the agent. Foreign employers who recruit from India are themselves registered on eMigrate, and a genuine job order is tied to a registered employer.
- If your passport is ECR-categorised, emigration clearance for the notified destination countries is granted through eMigrate, and the Protector of Emigrants office for your region handles it. An agent who says clearance can be arranged informally is describing an offence.
What to check before you pay anything
- Get the job offer in writing first. An employment contract naming the employer, the role, the wage, the hours, the accommodation arrangement and the contract length should exist before money changes hands. Verbal assurances about salary are the single most common source of later disputes.
- Insist on a receipt for every payment, on the agency’s letterhead, in the registered entity’s name, with the registration number on it. Cash into a personal account is a refusal point.
- Question anything called a security deposit, registration fee or file-processing charge collected before an offer exists. Legitimate visa, medical and travel costs are real and documented; open-ended pre-offer fees are not.
- Never hand over your original passport to an agent or an employer’s representative, in India or on arrival. Retention of passports is a standard feature of exploitative placements.
- Check the destination-country rules on who pays. Several Gulf states require the employer to bear recruitment, visa and travel costs, so an agency asking you for those charges may be operating against the employer’s own obligations.
- Keep copies of everything — the contract, the receipts, the licence number, the job order reference. If you need to raise a grievance later, through the MEA’s helpline or the Indian mission in the destination country, that paperwork is what the case rests on.
What the agencies on this site say about their own status
Fifty listings on Veritas carry the overseas and Gulf recruitment service tag. Only three of them describe themselves as registered recruiting agents on their own websites, and only one publishes a number. We record what each firm states; we have not verified any of it against the register.
- CUAN Immigration (Uttran, Surat) — the only listing that displays a licence number, given on its site as B-2446/GUJ/PER/100/5/10946/2024. It recruits for overseas employers in construction, healthcare, hospitality, logistics and manufacturing, running selection, documentation and employment-visa processing, with Dubai referenced as an operational hub. Founding year is not stated; a GSTIN is shown.
- Unihunt Consulting (C.G. Road, Ahmedabad) — states on its site that it is registered as a recruiting agent for overseas employment, but does not display the number. Trade categories are blue-collar and technical: air conditioning, carpentry, civil engineering, IT, drivers and operators, food and beverage, hotel and hospitality, housekeeping. No phone number is published.
- International Overseas Resources (Jetalpur Road, Vadodara) — trading as IOR HR, states it is approved by the Ministry of External Affairs but does not display the number. Its job board filters by country across Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq and Iran, and its work is squarely industrial: oil and gas, refineries, petrochemicals, power, shipyards and heavy fabrication.
Two more are worth naming for the opposite reason. Abroad Education & Consultancy Services in Ahmedabad advertises Australian MARA registration and posts overseas vacancies, but shows no MEA licence. Lakshya Placement in Vadodara lists Dubai, Malaysia and Singapore roles on its job board with no licence shown at all. Neither fact makes a firm illegitimate for the domestic work it also does — but if you are being recruited for a job abroad, the licence is the check that matters, and you should make it before you pay.
Where to go next
- All fifty firms on this site that recruit for overseas employers: overseas and Gulf recruitment agencies.
- The official register and emigration clearance: emigrate.gov.in.
- Domestic hiring instead: job consultancies in Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Surat.
- On fees charged to candidates: job consultancies that do not charge job seekers.