Ahmedabad · Choosing a consultant
How to check a visa consultant in Ahmedabad, in ten minutes
You came looking for a list of the best ones. Nearly every list of the best ones is written by the firm sitting at number one of it. Here is the check instead, which takes ten minutes and works on all of us.
The short answer
There is no reliable ranked list of the best visa consultants in Ahmedabad, because nearly every such list is published by a firm that places itself first on it. The check that does work takes ten minutes: ask for a licence number, search the regulator's own public register for it, confirm the name and company that come back match the people in front of you, and read the column that says whether they are entitled to practise. For Canada that regulator is the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants, and fewer than sixty of its licensees are registered to an address anywhere in India.
Every top ten in this city has an author, and the author wins
Search for the best visa consultants in Ahmedabad and the results are listicles. Read who published each one and a pattern appears immediately: the firm at number one is the firm that wrote the page. One of the pages currently ranking was published in October 2024 and has not been revisited since.
This is not a scandal, it is just advertising, and it would be harmless if the stakes were restaurants. They are not. The rest of that first page is directory listings sorted by who pays the directory, which is the same problem wearing a different hat. So the list is the wrong thing to look for, and we are not going to publish another one with ourselves near the top of it.
India does not license visa consultants, and that is the whole problem
There is no Indian licence to practise as an immigration or visa consultant. Anyone may print a brochure, rent an office on the SG Highway and start taking files. India does license one adjacent thing, recruitment for overseas employment under the Emigration Act, 1983, and that is a different activity from preparing a visa application.
So the only licence that means anything is the one issued by the country you are trying to go to, and it is held by a person rather than by a company. For Canada that is the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants. Its register is public, it is searchable, and reading it is the single most useful thing you can do before paying anybody in this market.
How small the real list is
The ten-minute check
Ask for the number, not the badge
A licence number, and the name of the person who holds it. A company name is not a licence, because licences are issued to individuals. If the answer is a certificate on the wall, a membership logo or the words "government approved", ask again for the number.
Search the regulator, not Google
Open the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants register and search by that number. Searching by company name also works and is a useful cross-check, because the company the register returns should be the company you are sitting in.
Read the entitled-to-practise column
This is the step almost everyone skips. A person can appear on the register and still be shown as not entitled to practise. We have seen current entries reading exactly that. Finding the name is not the end of the check; the column is.
Ask what the licence does not cover
A Canadian licence covers Canadian immigration. It says nothing about a UK, Australian or Schengen application, and no equivalent Indian licence exists for those. A firm selling thirty countries under one Canadian number should be able to tell you which of the thirty it is actually authorised for, and the honest answer is one.
Five claims that should slow you down
- "ICCRC approved"
- ICCRC was replaced by the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants in late 2021. A site still advertising ICCRC approval is quoting a body that no longer exists, which tells you how recently anyone checked that page. Ask for the current number.
- "Government certified" or "licensed for Ontario and Alberta"
- No Canadian province licenses immigration consultants, and no government certifies a consultancy as a company. Licensing is federal, through the College, and it attaches to a named person.
- A success rate
- Ninety-six per cent, ninety-eight per cent, one hundred per cent. None of these is auditable, none is published against a definition of what counted as a success, and the firms quoting them are usually the ones declining to quote a licence number.
- An education-agent membership offered as authorisation
- Bodies that certify education agents are real organisations doing a real job, and none of them authorises anybody to represent an applicant before an immigration department. If a membership number is offered when you asked for a licence number, you were answered with a different question.
- A job offer with a price on it
- An offer letter sold for a fee is the single most expensive mistake in this market, and it is about to get worse: from 3 November 2026 a qualifying Canadian job offer is worth up to 100 CRS points with no labour market assessment attached.
Every one of those is live on a consultancy website serving this city right now. We are not naming them, because the point is not which firm, it is that you can check the one you are actually talking to. What a work visa consultant can and cannot do covers the job-offer version in full.
Now run it on us
The number is R710507. Search it on the register and it returns Jay Sharma, company THE VISA TALES, class RCIC-L2, entitled to practise: yes. The number, the person and the company all come back from one search, which is the part worth testing elsewhere, because a firm that publishes a number without a name, or a name without a number, has not given you anything you can check.
And the limit, stated before you ask: that licence is Canadian and it covers Canadian immigration. We file applications for more than forty countries and we are an authorised representative for one of them. For the rest we are an experienced consultancy, which is a different thing, and we would rather you heard it from us than discovered it later.
If the check sends you somewhere else, go
Common questions
Who are the best visa consultants in Ahmedabad?
No honest answer to that question comes as a ranked list, because almost every "top 10 visa consultants in Ahmedabad" page is published by one of the firms on it, and that firm is at number one. A more useful test is whether a consultant will give you a licence number you can check against the regulator of the country you are going to, and whether the regulator's own register agrees. India has no licence for immigration or visa consulting, so an Indian registration, an ISO certificate or an education-agent membership tells you nothing about who may represent you.
Is my immigration consultant in Ahmedabad licensed?
Ask for the licence number and check it yourself on the regulator's public register. For Canada that is the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants, whose register is public and searchable by licence number, by name and by company. The column that decides it is "Entitled to Practise": a person can appear on the register and still be shown as not entitled, so finding the name is not the end of the check. Fewer than sixty licensees are registered to an address in India, which means the honest answer for most firms is that nobody in the building holds one.
What does ICCRC mean and is it still valid?
ICCRC was the former regulator of Canadian immigration consultants and it was replaced by the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants in late 2021. A consultancy whose website still advertises that it is "ICCRC approved" or "ICCRC registered" is quoting a body that has not existed for several years, which tells you how recently anyone checked that page. It does not by itself mean the firm is unlicensed; it does mean the claim on the page cannot be verified as written, and you should ask for the current licence number instead.
Ahmedabad
Check the number first. Then book if you want to.
R710507, Jay Sharma, on the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants public register. Canadian applications are prepared under that licence; for other countries we act as a consultancy and say so.
Three fields · about 30 seconds