Hire and Manage Talent in India, End to End
Why US and global businesses choose 97 Tech Center as their Employer of Record in India instead of incorporating locally.
Setting up a legal entity in India just to hire a few people is slow, expensive, and comes with ongoing compliance obligations most overseas companies would rather not own directly. 97 Tech Center solves this as your Employer of Record (EOR) partner in India.
We don’t just process payroll. We source, hire, and manage the compliance and employment risk around your India-based team – while you keep full control over the day-to-day work, direction, and training of your people.
What Sets Us Apart
Most EOR providers stop at statutory employment and payroll. We go further:
Replacement guarantee, at our expense.
If a consultant needs to be replaced — for performance, attrition, or fit — we source, hire, and onboard the replacement at no additional cost to you. It’s built into the engagement, not billed as a change order.
Overflow and surge capacity
Need extra hands for a launch, a migration, or a backlog burn-down? We deploy pre-vetted temporary resources on an hourly basis, no long-term commitment required.
Optional performance management support
Based entirely on the goals and evaluations your own managers provide — we help coordinate and document, you retain ownership of the assessment.
A dedicated local point of contact
For your team on employment, payroll, and HR matters.
Core Services
Permanent Establishment: How We Structure Around It
When a foreign company hires people in India, the concern is not whether it can. It is whether those people create a taxable presence for the parent company. If Indian tax authorities determine that your business has a permanent establishment here, your company can become liable for Indian corporate tax on profits attributed to that presence, plus filing obligations you never planned for. Working through an Employer of Record does not make this question disappear. It changes who signs the employment contract and who carries the statutory obligations, and it removes the most common triggers. Here is how we structure the relationship, and where the boundaries sit.
| Risk trigger | How our structure addresses it |
|---|---|
| Fixed place of business | Your team works from our registered Mumbai premises or their own homes. No office is leased, held or controlled in your company’s name |
| Employment relationship | Every person is employed by our Indian entity under Indian labour law. Contracts, payroll, statutory filings and termination all run through us. Your company is not a party to the employment contract |
| Dependent agent | Our employees are not authorised to negotiate, conclude or sign contracts on your behalf. This restriction is written into their employment terms, and we ask that your managers do not delegate that authority informally |
| Service PE and duration | Where your work involves personnel delivering services in India over extended periods, duration thresholds under the relevant tax treaty can still apply. We track engagement duration and flag it to you rather than leaving it to surface in an audit |
| Revenue-generating activity | The structure is designed for support, engineering and back-office functions. If you intend to sell into the Indian market or book India-sourced revenue, an EOR is the wrong vehicle and we will tell you so |
Your IP Stays Yours
If your India team is writing code, designing product, or handling anything you would call proprietary, the ownership question comes up before the pricing question. It should. Under Indian law, ownership of work product does not simply follow from paying for it, and an arrangement where the employer of record is a different legal entity from the company benefiting from the work needs the chain of assignment written down properly.
We handle this in three linked documents, so there is no gap between them.
| Layer | What it does |
|---|---|
| Employment agreement | Every employee assigns to us, on a present and ongoing basis, all rights in work product created in the course of employment. This includes copyright, patentable inventions and know-how, with an obligation to execute any further documents needed to perfect the assignment |
| Master services agreement | We assign that work product onward to you. The chain runs employee to 97 Tech Center to your company, with nothing sitting unassigned in the middle |
| Confidentiality and moral rights | Confidentiality obligations bind each employee directly, survive the end of employment, and cover your materials, systems and data. Where Indian law permits, moral rights are waived to the extent needed for you to modify and commercialise the work freely |
Assignment is present and automatic, not a promise to assign later. You are not relying on an ex-employee’s cooperation after they leave.
Individual confidentiality and IP undertakings are signed by each employee at onboarding. We can provide executed copies on request.
Your access controls stay yours. Employees work in your systems, your repositories and your environments, under your permissions.
On exit, we run a documented offboarding that includes return of materials, revocation of access and a written confirmation of continuing confidentiality obligations.
If your legal team wants specific language, background IP carve-outs, open source policy terms, or an obligation to notify on invention disclosure, we can work from your paper rather than insisting on ours.
Happy to send the relevant clauses to your counsel before you commit to anything. Most companies want to read the assignment language before they read our pricing, and we think that is the right order.
Compliance We Cover
Applied state-by-state, wherever your employees are based across India.
| Area | Coverage |
|---|---|
| Provident Fund (PF) | Employer and employee contributions filed per statutory requirements. |
| Employee State Insurance (ESI) | Applied where salary thresholds require it. |
| Gratuity | Accrued and paid per the Payment of Gratuity Act. |
| Professional Tax (PT) | Withheld and remitted per state requirements. |
| Shops & Establishment Act | Registered office compliance maintained. |
| POSH Compliance | Prevention of Sexual Harassment policy and grievance mechanism maintained at the entity level. |
| Leave & Holidays | Statutory leave entitlements administered per state labor rules. |
How It Works
Tell us what you need
Share your headcount, roles, and compensation bands.
We set up the agreement
A master services agreement and individual employment contracts under our Mumbai entity.
We onboard your team
Existing employees transition smoothly; new hires are sourced, screened, and onboarded against your requirements.
We run steady-state operations
Monthly payroll, compliance, and reporting begin – with performance management and overflow capacity available from day one.
Simple, Transparent Pricing
Our fee is a single markup over each consultant’s Cost to Company (CTC) – covering statutory employment, payroll, compliance, performance management, and the replacement guarantee. No separate management fee stacked on top. Overflow or temporary hourly resources are billed separately, only when you use them.
Why 97 Tech Center
We’re small, and we like it that way
Large EOR platforms serve thousands of clients across dozens of countries. We focus on India, and we keep our client roster small enough that you talk to people who actually know your account – not a support queue.
We’re operators, not just administrators
Our core business is building and managing technical teams for our own client engagements. The discipline we bring to sourcing, hiring, and managing performance for this partnership is the same discipline we use in our own operations.
Pan-India reach, with a local home base
We’re registered and based in Goregaon, Mumbai, but we hire and manage talent across India, not just Maharashtra – with the state-by-state compliance knowledge to back it up.
Proven at scale
We currently manage several hundred employees on behalf of multiple US-based companies.