IBROYS Journal
We checked every licensed recruiting agent in Kerala. Two-thirds have no website that works.
India's Ministry of External Affairs publishes a list of every recruiting agent licensed to send workers abroad. It is a public register, updated by the eMigrate system, and it includes a website column.
We took the Kerala portion of that register and did something simple: we tried to open every one of those websites.
305 agents in Kerala hold an active licence. 104 of them have a website that loads.
That is 34%. The other 66% either never listed a site, or listed one that no longer answers.
What we found
| Active agents (305) | ||
|---|---|---|
| Lists a website in the register | 157 | 51% |
| Website actually loads | 104 | 34% |
| Domain listed, but no longer resolves | 38 | 12% |
| No website listed at all | 148 | 49% |
| WhatsApp link anywhere on the site | 14 | 5% |
| Any contact form | 37 | 12% |
Of the 104 sites that do load, most are technically fine: 98 use HTTPS, 93 work on a phone. The people who built a site mostly built a reasonable one.
The problem isn't quality. It's absence.
The Gmail number
The register also carries each agent's official contact email — the address on file with the ministry.
192 of 304 use a free email account — gmail.com, yahoo, rediffmail, hotmail. That's 63%.
A worker in Malappuram deciding whether to trust an agency with two years of salary and a passport has, for two out of three licensed agents, nothing to check but a Gmail address.
It is not evenly spread
| District | Active + expired agents | With a working site |
|---|---|---|
| Kozhikode | 28 | 46% |
| Kollam | 14 | 36% |
| Thiruvananthapuram | 41 | 34% |
| Ernakulam | 224 | 31% |
| Malappuram | 15 | 27% |
| Kottayam | 29 | 24% |
| Alappuzha | 14 | 21% |
| Thrissur | 25 | 20% |
| Palakkad | 10 | 20% |
| Pathanamthitta | 10 | 20% |
Ernakulam holds more than half of Kerala's licensed agents — 224 of them — and fewer than a third have a working website.
The 5% that surprised us
We expected the website numbers to be low. We did not expect this one.
14 sites out of 305 have a WhatsApp link.
Every one of these agencies places workers in the Gulf. WhatsApp is how the Gulf does business — it is how candidates ask about their visa, how employers send requirements, how families check on a relative's paperwork. It is already the channel. Almost none of them have put it on their website.
That is a one-line piece of HTML. It costs nothing. It is missing from 95% of them.
What this actually means
Two readings, and both are true.
If you are a recruiting agent: the bar is on the floor. You are not competing with slick technology. Two-thirds of your licensed competitors cannot be found or contacted online at all. A working page, a WhatsApp button and an email on your own domain would put you ahead of most of the register — that's a weekend, not a project.
If you are a worker or an employer checking an agency: the absence of a website is not proof of anything. Some of Kerala's oldest and most reputable agencies run entirely on phone calls and word of mouth. But you can always verify a licence: the agent's RA number and status are public in the eMigrate register, and a licence that reads RC Expired or cancelled is worth knowing about before you pay anyone. Of the 426 Kerala records we parsed, 63 had expired registrations and 21 were cancelled.
How we measured this
Being clear about method, because numbers like these are easy to get wrong.
- Source: District and State wise list of RA (Recruiting Agents), published by the Ministry of
External Affairs from the eMigrate system, dated 20-03-2025 (797 pages). We parsed all 3,039 records nationally and filtered to Kerala: 426 records, of which 305 are marked Active.
- Percentages above use the 305 active agents as the denominator, except the district table,
which uses all Kerala records so the counts match the register.
- The test: for each listed website we resolved the domain, then requested the homepage over
HTTPS (falling back to HTTP), following redirects, with a 15-second timeout. "Loads" means it answered with HTTP 200. We then checked the returned HTML for a mobile viewport tag, a WhatsApp link (wa.me, api.whatsapp.com), and any <form>.
- Date of testing: 12 September 2026.
- What this can't tell you: a site can be down for a day and we'd score it dead. An agency can
run a busy Facebook or Instagram presence and no website, and we'd score it absent — we did not measure social profiles. A contact form can exist behind a link we didn't crawl; we only read the homepage. And the register itself may lag reality — an agency could have launched a site last month and not updated its filing.
- Tools: the register is a public PDF; parsing and checking were done with Python. Nothing here
required a paid tool, and no site was crawled more than once.
If you are one of the agencies in this list and your website was working when we weren't looking, tell us and we'll correct the record.
IBROYS is a studio in Kerala. We build the systems that take document work off people's desks. This post exists because we wanted to know how digital this industry actually is before claiming we could help it — the answer changed how we talk about it.
Published 12 September 2026.
