For the first time in 15 years, Indian expatriates in the UAE woke up this month to find no outsourced service centre to renew a passport, apply for a visa or attest a document. The counters run by BLS International shut on June 30. The new provider, Alhind Tours and Travels, has not been allowed to open.The reason sits 2,500 kilometres away, in a courtroom in New Delhi, where two companies that never even reached the financial bidding stage have managed to freeze consular services for the world’s largest Indian expatriate community.
The Embassy of India in Abu Dhabi and the Consulate General of India in Dubai have stepped in with limited walk-in services from July 2, offering passport, visa and attestation services on a first-come, first-served basis between 9am and 12.30pm. Mission staff, not a contractor, are now processing applications for a community of about 4.5 million people. The missions have called the arrangement temporary and cited “administrative reasons.”
The real reason is litigation.
A contract worth fighting for
The numbers explain why this tender has ended up before the Supreme Court of India. The Indian missions in the UAE processed more than 1.58 million services and transactions between January 2022 and December 2024, roughly 1,760 every working day. In 2024 alone, they handled around 561,000 services, including more than 364,000 passport applications.
Every one of those transactions carries a service fee for the outsourced provider, on top of charges for photographs, photocopying, courier and other add-ons. Multiply even a modest per-transaction margin across half a million transactions a year, guaranteed for three years, and the UAE contract becomes one of the most valuable consular outsourcing deals anywhere in the world. When a Delhi court restored BLS International’s eligibility for government tenders last December, the company’s shares jumped as much as 7.4 per cent in a single morning. The stock market, at least, has no doubt what these contracts are worth.
How the tender unfolded
BLS International, the New Delhi-headquartered, stock exchange-listed firm led by Joint Managing Director Shikhar Aggarwal, had held the UAE contract since 2011, with repeated extensions. SGIVS Global, formerly IVS Global, handled attestation services separately since 2013.
In October 2025, the Ministry of External Affairs debarred BLS from all future MEA and mission tenders for two years, citing allegations including court cases and complaints from applicants. That order, later quashed by the Delhi High Court in December, kept BLS out of the fresh UAE tender floated in November 2025.
The new tender sought a single provider to run unified Indian Consular Application Centres across the country. Four companies cleared the technical evaluation and reached the financial stage: Alhind, VFS Global, DU Digital Global and SGIVS Global. When financial bids were opened on March 30, Alhind’s offer of Dh19 per transaction, all-inclusive and covering even photography, was the lowest. The contract was awarded on April 20 for three years, with 16 centres planned across all seven emirates and more than 300 staff being hired.
For applicants, the Alhind deal actually promised relief from years of layered charges. “We plan to charge only a minimal Dh19 above the mandated service charges specified by the embassy,” Alhind Group Chairman Mohammed Haris T told Khaleej Times in April. “This will be unified and include all the services, including photography and photocopying.”
The companies that went to court
The legal challenge did not come from the losing finalists. It came from two firms eliminated earlier, at the technical evaluation stage: E Trav Tech Limited and Verasys Limited.
E Trav Tech is a Rajkot, Gujarat-based travel technology company, three decades old, controlled by the Ruparelia family, with Henil Ruparelia as managing director. Listed travel major EaseMyTrip acquired a roughly five per cent stake in the company in 2024. Verasys is a Mumbai company best known for its VSign digital signature certificate business.
Court records from the Delhi High Court reveal how systematically the two firms have contested India’s consular outsourcing tenders worldwide. E Trav Tech filed petitions over the tenders for Abu Dhabi, where it scored 67.5 per cent in the technical round, as well as Canberra, Riyadh, Kuwait and London. Verasys challenged the Abu Dhabi and Canberra tenders. In each case the companies fell short of the 70 per cent technical qualifying mark and demanded a detailed break-up of their scores and the reasons for disqualification.
The same records contain a telling footnote: Alhind itself, the winner in the UAE, filed a petition over the Kuwait tender, where it scored 60 per cent and did not qualify. In this business, it appears, everyone litigates in the markets they lose.
The case so far
The petitioners argue the scoring was arbitrary. E Trav Tech says it was awarded zero marks on a turnaround-time criterion despite committing to the exact 30-minute benchmark the tender required, and disproportionately low marks on facilitation, grievance redressal and market reputation, with no reasons given.
The Delhi High Court, in a judgment on March 10, broadly upheld the government’s discretion in tender evaluation and declined to order a detailed score break-up while the process was live, though it held that disqualified bidders are entitled to reasons for rejection. The government told the court it would disclose marks after financial bids were opened and winners identified, warning that earlier disclosure would jeopardise the process and delay services that expatriate Indians were waiting for.
The companies then moved the Supreme Court, arguing that allowing Alhind’s takeover before the courts examined the evaluation records would make their challenge meaningless, since contractual rights would crystallise and third-party interests would arise once operations began. The Supreme Court ordered status quo and directed the High Court to take the matter up urgently. The High Court clubbed the connected petitions on June 29 and listed them for July 1, then adjourned to July 2. No ruling on interim relief has been issued, and the case has not been decided on merits.
The result is a standoff nobody designed. BLS and SGIVS have kept their offices and staff intact in case the courts reopen the door for them. Alhind has its 16 centres ready but cannot open them. And embassy officers are manning walk-in counters built for a fraction of the daily volume.
The people paying the price
None of the litigants is an expatriate worker. Yet it is the worker with an expiring passport, the parent needing a birth registration, the student awaiting an attested certificate for college admission who now stands in a morning queue outside the embassy gates in the July heat.
The Ministry of External Affairs designed this tender to consolidate and cheapen consular services for its largest overseas community. Instead, a dispute over technical scores between companies most applicants have never heard of has delivered the opposite: no provider at all.
The Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court are expected to give clarity in the coming days. Depending on the outcome, Alhind’s rollout could proceed, be delayed further, or the evaluation could be sent back for review. Until then, the message from Delhi to Dubai is an uncomfortable one: in the battle over who profits from serving India’s diaspora, the diaspora itself waits at the back of the queue.
Sources: Delhi High Court judgment in E Trav Tech Limited vs Union of India (March 10, 2026); Embassy of India, Abu Dhabi notices; Khaleej Times; company filings and Ministry of Corporate Affairs records.
