Employer of Record for
IT & Tech Companies
in India

TankhaPay protects your IP through four contract mechanisms built into every employment agreement. First, under Section 17 of India's Copyright Act, all work created under a contract of service belongs to the employer — TankhaPay ensures this applies to your company through explicit IP assignment clauses covering present and future work product. Second, every contract includes a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) covering source code, trade secrets, and confidential business information. Third, work-for-hire language ensures all deliverables are owned by your organization from Day 1. Fourth, moral-rights waivers prevent developers from claiming authorship rights over code they created during employment.

The three critical differences are IP ownership, compliance risk, and legal classification. Contractors in India retain IP ownership by default unless a written assignment exists — creating a gap that only surfaces during audits or acquisitions. EOR employment transfers IP automatically through the employment contract. Contractors also create misclassification risk — if Indian authorities deem them employees, your company faces retrospective PF, ESI, and TDS liability. EOR eliminates this entirely. Finally, contractors do not receive statutory benefits — Provident Fund, ESI, gratuity — which creates employee satisfaction and retention issues for ongoing tech roles. EOR covers all statutory obligations from Day 1.

Yes. Using an Employer of Record like TankhaPay, you can legally hire developers and engineers in India without registering a local entity. TankhaPay becomes the legal employer on record, managing employment contracts, INR payroll, and all statutory compliance, while you retain full control of day-to-day work and performance.

Global EOR providers cover 150 to 180 countries — India is one market among many, often managed through third-party aggregators rather than an owned local entity. TankhaPay has operated exclusively in India for 26 years under AKAL Information Systems Ltd, a CMMI-appraised, ISO 9001, 27001, 20000, and 14001 certified technology company. We own our India entity, operate our own compliance team, and manage state-level variations as core expertise — not edge cases. When a Karnataka Professional Tax query or a missed ESI filing window arises, TankhaPay resolves it directly with no intermediary delay. For companies where India is the primary hiring market, this depth of specialization cannot be matched by a global generalist platform.

Under Section 17 of India's Copyright Act, work created under a contract of service belongs to the employer. TankhaPay's EOR contracts include explicit IP assignment clauses transferring all ownership rights, including present and future work to your company. Your codebase, product, and proprietary technology remains fully yours.

For ongoing roles, EOR is significantly safer. Contractors retain IP ownership by default under Indian law unless explicitly assigned. They also create misclassification risk and potential permanent establishment exposure. TankhaPay's EOR model gives you full-time employment compliance, statutory benefits and watertight IP protection, without entity setup costs.

TankhaPay onboards most employees in 2–3 business days. This includes employment contract generation, document collection, payroll configuration, PF and ESI registration and portal access provisioning. Compared to 2–6 months for entity incorporation, EOR gives you a critical speed advantage, especially important in India's competitive tech hiring market.

TankhaPay charges a flat per-employee monthly fee calculated on annual salary, no percentage-based markups, no hidden charges. This is significantly more cost-effective than setting up a local entity, hiring a compliance team, and managing payroll independently. Contact us for a custom quote based on your team size and location

Yes. TankhaPay manages the complete device lifecycle for EOR-hired Engineers, procurement, delivery, tracking, and recovery on exit. This removes internal coordination overhead and ensures your remote developers in India have the hardware they need from Day 1, fully managed through the EOR platform.

Employer of Record (EOR) is the default choice as the first step for any GCC that is set up in India. The registration process for setting up a GCC entity under the Companies Act 2013 takes 6 to 18 months. TankhaPay will be able to bring in your first GCC employee within 2 to 3 days. The most common practice adopted by the majority of MNCs is to have their GCC staffed with TankhaPay EOR until the India entity gets incorporated. Once the GCC entity is set up, TankhaPay facilitates the process of transitioning all employees from EOR to GCC entity employment without having any legal gaps during the process. Bulk onboarding of 50 to 500+ employees and simultaneous multi-city staffing across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune is supported from one engagement.

Yes. A US-incorporated company that has no Indian entity, branch office, or subsidiary can engage Indian software engineers, data scientists, product managers, and DevOps engineers through TankhaPay EOR right from Day 1. TankhaPay acts as the Employer of Record in India who will issue the Indian employment contracts based on Indian laws, manage PF contribution at 12%, ESI at 3.25% where applicable, Section 192 TDS, and Professional Tax, while the US-incorporated company continues to have operational and strategic control over the team. This type of employment model also solves the problem of Permanent Establishment risk in Section 9 of Income Tax Act 1961. The first hire will be made in 2 to 3 business days from acceptance of the offer letter.

Section 17(2) of Income Tax Act 1961 mandates that ESOP be treated as perquisite in the year of exercise. The perquisite income is the difference between the fair market value of the share in exercise and the cost incurred by the employee to exercise the option and such amount is added to his taxable salary and TDS is deducted on this amount by TankhaPay in the month of exercise. The FMV of the unlisted company share is computed as per rule 3(8)(c) of the Income Tax Rules 1962 by a Registered Category I Merchant Banker. RSUs become salary income in the year of vesting and TDS is applicable then. TankhaPay maintains a calendar for ESOP grant as well as vesting of RSU for each employee, applies TDS on each event as required, and shows the perquisite income separately in Form 16 without creating any discrepancy in Form 26AS due to wrong handling of ESOP TDS.

A moonlighting policy entails clauses on secondary employment. Secondary employment refers to working for another employer, who is usually a competitor, while employed by another organization. Following the termination of about 300 workers from Wipro due to undisclosed secondary employment and the introduction of secondary employment clauses by Infosys and others in the Indian IT industry, clauses on secondary employment are now common practice in Indian IT employment contracts. TankhaPay includes four clauses in each employment contract: a secondary employment disclosure clause that requires the employee to obtain written approval before entering into secondary employment; a conflict of interest clause defining competitors and organizations in adjacent sectors; an intellectual property contamination clause requiring disclosure of any code or invention developed during secondary employment that makes use of knowledge acquired during primary employment; and a termination clause in case of undisclosed secondary employment with a competitor. These clauses protect your IP provenance before a funding round or acquisition creates due diligence exposure.

The notice periods for tech professionals in India usually range from 60 to 90 days. TankhaPay handles three kinds of notice periods. The first one is notice period buyout, which means that when the client wants the employment terminated early, TankhaPay calculates and pays out the buyout amount in lieu of notice through the payroll system with proper TDS calculations. Garden Leave refers to the situation where the employee is put on notice without working; this is handled through TankhaPay payroll and compliance because Indian law mandates that employees must receive their salary regardless of whether they perform any work or not. Full and final settlement is managed through the Payment of Wages Act 1936 and Industrial Relations Code 2020. TankhaPay takes care of entire salary, leave encashment, gratuity if any, proportional performance bonus, TDS of all FnF amounts, issue of Form 16, and EPFO PF transfer or withdrawal. Zero residual liability remains with the client after exit.

There are three definite reasons why TankhaPay should be considered the right India EOR for technology companies. First, the company has worked exclusively in India since 2000 within Akal Information Systems Ltd for 26 years, while other global EOR platforms have only been working in India for 3 to 8 years. Secondly, TankhaPay is the owned entity and its ECR for EPFO is filed by TankhaPay's own compliance team without any local aggregator partners. Thirdly, TankhaPay offers a tech employment framework which includes ESOP perquisite TDS management under Section 17(2), moonlighting clauses for IP protection, GCC transition management and multi-state remote work compliance. Zero compliance penalties across 500+ clients since 2000. ISO 27001 certified. CMMI Appraised. Government of India technology clients include NIC, NEGD and STPI.

Technology companies operating in India tend to distribute their workforce among different states, whereby one individual works from Kerala but is part of the Bengaluru based team. TankhaPay captures the state of work location of each individual and ensures that the right state compliance is enforced on that particular employee. The state compliance entails the applicable state Shops and Establishments Act for working hours and leave, the correct Professional Tax — Karnataka: INR 200 per month, Telangana: slab-based up to INR 2,500 per year, Delhi: Zero PT, Kerala: Zero PT — and the state minimum wage floor for the relevant category. In case of permanent relocation by an employee to a new state, the state compliance is updated in the subsequent payroll cycle. No state registrations are required by the client organization — TankhaPay has active registrations in all 28 states covering every remote work configuration.