On Jan. 13, 2024, Ravi Moun left for Russia to work, and on March 13, his family was informed that he was dead.
Originally from Matour village in the north Indian state of Haryana, 21-year-old Moun was like any other young man in the country’s villages. He had completed school until grade 10 and was helping his brother Ajay cultivate their small 1-acre plot of land, even though profits were minimal. So when a local agent offered him a job in Russia, he jumped at it. “We thought if even one of us goes, the lives of our whole family will be better,” Ajay, 25, told New Lines.
A number of people from Matour had already gone overseas in search of work through this agent, some to the U.S., others to Canada. Moreover, Ajay had once worked for this man. All this contributed to the trust they put in him. The family sold their land and paid the agent 1.1 million rupees (almost $13,000) to send Ravi to Russia. The job was supposed to be in transport with a salary of 100,000 rupees a month.
But as soon as he landed, Ravi was made to sign a contract in Russian, which said that he would work on the front lines of the Russia-Ukraine war for a year. He was given 15 days of training on how to dig trenches and then shipped off to the front. “If we knew what kind of job Ravi would be made to do in Russia, we would never have sent him — even if they promised 10 lakh [1 million] salary. Why will we go there to die?” Ajay said.
Ajay subsequently filed a police complaint against the agent who had sent Ravi to Russia. “I waited a month after Ravi’s death. I thought, this is a guy from our village, we can sort it out ourselves. But when he didn’t come to me, I finally decided to go to the police,” Ajay said. The police arrested the agent but released him a few months later.
Ravi wasn’t the only one. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Indian government has reported that 126 Indians have served in the Russian army. They were scammed by local agents in India and were made to think they would get routine jobs in construction, security and transport.
An acute shortage of domestic soldiers has forced Russia to rely on foreign contract fighters like these to sustain its war efforts. But most of these youth had no idea what they were signing up for. Since the scam came to light, 96 people have returned to India, 12 have been killed in the conflict and 16 are believed to be missing. One is being treated for injuries at a Moscow hospital.
In a country where unemployment has increased in the last few years, touching almost 9% of the population and a whopping 45.4% of youth, India has witnessed a proliferation of job scams and illegal migration. From Indians being lured to Cambodia to work in cybercrime compounds, where criminal groups run online scams, to fake promises of securing government jobs in exchange for cash, countless examples have recently come to light.
Illegal migration from India also came under the spotlight recently after the Trump administration sent home four flights of Indian deportees who had illegally entered the United States. Many of them likely used the “donkey route” — which involves transit across Europe, West Africa and South America — to reach the U.S. land border, cross it and eventually file for asylum. Facilitating illegal migration is also referred to as “kabootarbaazi” (“pigeon handling”) in India, as agents make money from “kabootars” (“pigeons”) looking to fly abroad.
Indian foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar recently told Parliament that there would be a “strong crackdown on the illegal migration industry.” Earlier, the Ministry of External Affairs informed Parliament that it had listed 3,094 uncertified “illegal agents” on its eMigrate portal as of October 2024, along with advisories and alerts on fake job offers, and fraudulent and illegal recruitment agencies.
In the last couple of months, Indian law enforcement has been filing police complaints against travel agents in the states of Punjab and Haryana who had allegedly sent people to the U.S., promising them safe and legal migration. In Punjab, a special investigation team set up recently to look into illegal migration, booked 15 agents and arrested three in the last month. In Haryana, at least six agents have been booked. Until now, however, there has been little reporting to help understand the ecosystem of recruitment agencies and subagents in facilitating overseas job migration.
India’s gullible youth often pay millions of rupees in bribes and commissions to agents for jobs that don’t materialize, and if and when they do, they are often characterised by low pay, hazardous conditions and few safeguards. Agents exploit people’s desperation to make a living or their burgeoning desire to migrate abroad.
It is often people from the lower middle classes and the working class who opt for the overseas jobs on offer in sectors such as construction, security, retail and transport. Demand has always been high since the salaries are two to three times the pay for the same jobs in India. In some places, workers also get free food and accommodation.
The long-established top destinations for overseas work are countries in the Gulf, but in the last couple of years, people have also been migrating to countries like Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Myanmar and Russia. Illegal migration trends also show that Indians are open to migrating to Eastern European countries such as Poland, Romania and Hungary, as well as South Korea and Israel.
Even if one seeks jobs through government-certified legal agents, it has become impossible to navigate the system without the network of subagents, who are uncertified and gatekeep the process, charging a commission and promising that candidates will have an edge over others during the hiring process. Moreover, many legal agents refuse to directly engage with the candidates and outsource this work to subagents.
Workers have little agency in this ecosystem and, in most cases, don’t even know where they are going or what exactly the job and pay are until they reach the airport of the final destination. Control rests with a chain of intermediaries ranging from village-level subagents to agents with more power and recruiting agencies certified by the Ministry of External Affairs. The majority of them are working to maximize their own profits. “Agents are crawling like snakes in every village and town across the country. This is the manpower industry and it’s much bigger than you can imagine,” a recruiting agent told New Lines.
Each rung has a predefined role and gets a share of the profits in return. For instance, subagents’ role is to mobilize candidates for the certified agents, who then present them to the overseas companies. Also involved in the ecosystem are training centers that upskill youth for such lucrative jobs, hostels in cities like Delhi that provide accommodation and hospitals that conduct medical checkups to issue fitness certificates.
Almost all of the hiring that happens through a certified recruiting agent (RA) is legal. The central government has certified more than 2,000 such agencies across the country. But where it gets tricky is the vast legion of subagents who work under RAs and are unlicensed and, technically, illegal. Until 2021, it was estimated that the number of unregulated agents operating in the country was close to 100,000, a number that has most likely increased since then, as illegal migration and job scams have risen due to increasing unemployment.
Overseas recruiting is a tricky business, but Naiyar Siddique knows it inside out. He runs a government-certified recruiting agency in Delhi that he inherited from his father in 2018. Like a majority of agents and government-approved agencies in the country, he mostly recruits for jobs in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, predominantly the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Recruitment in the Gulf, he said, has seen a significant jump the last six months as construction for Saudi Arabia’s Neom city is being carried out at breakneck speed.
At the outset, the process of recruitment seems simple. Companies reach out to certified agents like Siddique with their requirements, often for construction-related roles, and the agents look for people in different parts of the country. Recruiters from interested companies then come to India to facilitate the hiring process.
On a cold January morning, Siddique’s agency was recruiting for 40 types of jobs for a Saudi Arabian company, and the Arab Tech Centre, a job training facility in Delhi, was teeming with people. Siddique estimates that approximately a thousand people had shown up by 2 p.m., out of which 200 would be selected.
Since it is not feasible to conduct a skills test on the spot, recruiters ask candidates situational questions about the job they are applying for. But most of the time, recruiters prefer candidates with a “GCC experience certificate” — proof that they have worked in the Gulf before. “This gives them faith that he will be able to do my job as well,” Siddique said. If the candidate has only worked in India, he needs to have at least 10 years of experience.
But the catch is in how recruiting agents like Siddique manage to rally job seekers for these interviews, which involves conducting massive outreach to mobilize workers across villages and small towns in India to come to the capital city of Delhi. Most agents have neither the time nor resources to do this.
This is where a gaggle of subagents comes into the picture. “Below agents like us, there is a subagent, then another subagent under him, then another, then another and then finally, there’s the ground level guy in the village, who’ll travel from lane to lane rounding up people,” explained Siddique. “It’s their responsibility to get them to big metros for interviews. Like this, there’s a full chain of agents.” He has 324 subagents working under him.
The subagents don’t have a license from the government to hire people for jobs, but without them, it is impossible for RAs to function. The government, too, turns a blind eye as long as the final hiring is carried out through a certified agent.
Rajinder, who asked to be referred to by his first name to protect his identity, is one such subagent working for Siddique. When he had just started in this business, he would go village to village, recruiting people for all kinds of jobs. But that was eight years ago. Rajinder now has a solid base of contacts — a WhatsApp group of 1,800 people, mostly unemployed youth from villages across the country. “If I send 10 people abroad and even five of them have a good experience, they’ll give all their family and friends my number. And that’s how my contacts keep growing,” Rajinder said.
This decentralized system works like clockwork. Subagents usually come from the same villages, towns or states as the candidates they recruit, which adds an element of trust. “A lot of times, the candidate’s uncle is friends with the subagent’s father — there’s a connection, and they know they can beat up this subagent if something goes wrong. Alternatively, they won’t trust someone sitting in a Delhi office,” Siddique said.
Despite the disincentives, people continue to work with subagents out of desperation to earn a livelihood and with the hope of earning a better salary abroad. They also have few options other than these subagents when looking for job opportunities.
Of the 500 candidates Siddique’s agency sends abroad every month, 480 come through subagents. Only 20 are direct candidates. “See, we don’t accept direct passports — because the candidate will keep calling me, and I can’t field every single person’s calls. It’s easier for me to deal with one subagent, who has 20 clients under him,” Siddique said.
The candidates’ subsequent relationships with these subagents are also very personal. Between the time candidates reach out to the subagent and when they go abroad, the subagent almost becomes a kind of therapist: If the candidate is feeling a lack of confidence, he will boost him up; if he’s having a fight with his wife, he will intervene; if his mother is sick, he will recommend medicines.
It’s not like subagents are doing this from the goodness of their heart. They charge a fee for this service. According to the Ministry of External Affairs, certified agents are allowed to charge a maximum of 60,000 rupees (nearly $700), from candidates looking to go abroad, a sum that includes flight tickets.
But in reality, candidates end up spending much more, as uncertified subagents charge anywhere between 20,000 and 1.5 million rupees to facilitate the entire process, from prepping them for interviews to coordinating with the RAs and getting the visa and flight tickets. The entire process is so fraught with gatekeeping and red tape that candidates have no choice but to work with subagents.
Rajinder usually charges candidates between 70,000 and 100,000 rupees. There are also additional costs for training, medical checkups and experience certificates. For instance, subagents have relationships with hospitals to carry out fitness checks for their candidates. The official cost is just 1,000 rupees, but subagents solicit 3,500 rupees from candidates, earning a commission on each test.
In this field, like any other, competition is high, and so is the scope for fleecing unsuspecting candidates — which is why both Rajinder and Siddique stress that to be a successful subagent, you have to be good at marketing yourself — or, in other words, sugarcoating the truth.
For instance, if a candidate wants to go to Saudi Arabia for work, he will approach various subagents for offers. If one subagent offers him a job in Saudi Arabia with a salary of 1,200 riyals ($320) for a commission of 75,000 rupees, and Rajinder offers him a salary of 1,400 riyals for the same cost, the candidate will end up going with Rajinder.
But many times, the promised salaries are inflated and the subagent’s commission keeps increasing as additional costs pile up. Sometimes, subagents charge extra from candidates who don’t want to go through the interview process. And it is possible that they may not even get the job in the end.
All these reasons made subagent Khan, who wanted to go by his last name, quit the field. “I used to be a subagent in Bihar, but it didn’t work well for me — you have to lie a lot,” he told New Lines. He recounted how youngsters used to call him at night. “When it’s nighttime here [in India], it would be 5 or 6 p.m. there [in Saudi Arabia], and they would be getting off work,” Khan said. “They would call me, complaining that they were not getting this or that. We’re not getting promised salary, or food is bad. You lied to me, you cheated me.” He felt so helpless, but as a subagent, he had minimal agency in the system.
However, if one of the candidates or their family members decide to take action against a fake job or mistreatment, they often file cases against subagents like Khan — because they are their only point of contact. According to official data, over 4,000 police complaints were filed across the country against illegal recruiting agents from 2021 until June 2024. But preliminary action was taken by the police only against 10% of those. The prosecution and conviction rate remains low. “Because the clients and agents often make a deal: The person who has been cheated gets his money back, and in return, they request to police that the agent be let go,” Hardial Singh Mann, a retired police official from Punjab, told NPR in a 2020 interview.
In 2023, when the Indian government announced that it would be directly recruiting for overseas jobs, it was seen as a welcome move given the monopoly of agents and subagents. As the war in Gaza was picking up pace, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had signed an agreement whereby Israel would recruit “tens of thousands of workers” from India to replace Palestinian labor.
According to Siddique, the government decided to enter this space because a large portion of the recruiting industry, including agents and subagents, was predominantly Muslim and refused to work with Israel. When the remaining agents were unable to fulfill Israel’s massive labor requirements, the Indian government stepped in to recruit directly. Part of the intention was that, with government intervention, illegal migration would also be curbed.
State governments were tasked with carrying out recruitment drives. Since then, the industry has grown. Last year, the Haryana government started facilitating overseas recruitment and invited job applications in 41 categories, including construction workers in Israel, nurses in the U.K. and bouncers in Dubai. Governments in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Telangana followed suit.
In the last five years, the Indian government has signed labor mobility agreements with several countries, including Denmark, Japan, Portugal, Mauritius, Israel, Taiwan and Malaysia, to create job opportunities for Indian workers.
However, some candidates have alleged that even with government-led recruitment, only those who came through agents were getting selected. Anil Sharma, 40, who had applied for the job of carpenter and went to Rohtak for the selections, said that he spoke to a few men, all of whom said they had come through agents. “Some had paid 80,000 rupees, others 100,000.”
Assistant employment officer Richa Arya, who works in the Haryana government, acknowledged that there were a lot of agents who had facilitated the process for job aspirants. “But once you enter the testing center, the agent is of no use. Ultimately, the Israelis were selecting who they wanted,” she said.
The government has long turned a blind eye to illegal agents and subagents operating in the overseas recruitment space. “It’s very important to understand that, when it comes to illegal migration, it’s very easy to blame illegal agents. But the buck stops with the government,” M.B. Reddy, president of the Emigrants’ Welfare Forum, a nongovernmental organization working for migrants’ rights, told New Lines.
In a 2018 interview with Lokmarg, an online Indian magazine, an agent who facilitated illegal migration said if illegal immigrants are caught at the airport, it is because the agent didn’t pay the government official on the immigration desk at the airport. “Their fee, usually around 50,000 rupees, is a must,” he said.
It’s only in cases of diplomatic pressure, Reddy said, that the Indian government takes action and shifts blame onto illegal agents. A lot of them are subagents, working for certified RAs. “It’s like the role of a nurse in medicine. They themselves are not performing the operations, but without them, a hospital cannot function,” he said.
Subagents have been asking the government to formally certify them with a reasonable license fee because to become a certified RA, one needs to deposit at least 5 million rupees with the government as a guarantee — a sum most cannot afford. The Indian government has been working to formulate a new law, to replace an outdated 1983 one, that will include subagents. “All these people are intrinsic to the system of overseas migration,” Reddy said. “Instead of doing away with them, the government simply needs to start regulating them.”
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