Advocate Richa Dhanda: The Lawyer Trying To Make India's Immigration Industry Tell The Truth

Advocate Richa Dhanda did not set out to specialise in immigration law because it was fashionable. She got there by watching, case after case, what happens to a family that trusts the wrong person with its savings.

"In most of the disputes I encountered early in my practice, the legal issue was almost secondary," she says. "The real story was always the same — a family had paid someone who was never accountable to begin with, and by the time they came to me, the money and the time were already gone." That observation shaped the rest of her career.

Today, as an immigration lawyer and legal advisor at Madhav Immigration Pvt. Ltd., a government-approved consultancy headquartered in Kurukshetra, Advocate Dhanda occupies an unusual position in an industry not known for self-scrutiny. Her role is not simply to process paperwork. It is to insist that the process itself be defensible — legally, and ethically.

That insistence shows up in how she talks to clients. Long before discussing a country or a program, she walks families through a basic verification exercise most immigration consultants never mention. "Ask any agency for their CIN and check it on the MCA portal. Ask for their GST number and verify it independently. If they cannot give you either, you are not dealing with a company — you are dealing with an individual pretending to be one," she says. "It sounds almost too simple. But it is exactly the check that most families skip, and it is the one that would have protected most of the clients whose disputes I have handled."

She is equally direct about the credentials agents like to display. "An MEA RA licence tells you an agent can recruit for the Gulf. It does not tell you whether they are honest. People confuse authorisation with integrity, and fraudulent operators count on that confusion."

It is this candour that has shaped Madhav Immigration's own identity since its founding in 201 3. The consultancy has built its reputation on a tagline that reads almost like a rebuttal to the rest of the industry — "We are Genuine, Not No.1 ." Advocate Dhanda says the phrase is not marketing so much as description. "The agencies causing the most damage are usually the loudest about guarantees. We made an early decision not to compete on volume of promises. We compete on whether what we tell a client turns out to be true."

That approach has scaled further than either might have predicted a decade ago. Madhav Immigration now serves clients across India — from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to Kerala and the Delhi NCR — as well as from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, with on-ground teams in Mauritius, Singapore, Malta, and Cyprus. In 2025, the company received the Best MSME National Award, recognition Advocate Dhanda describes as validating a slower, less flashy way of building a business.

For her, though, the measure of success remains narrower and more personal. "I still think about the families who came to me after being cheated," she says. "What I want, working here, is for fewer of those families to exist in the first place — and for the ones who do come to us to know, from the very first conversation, exactly what they are getting into."