14 questions to ask before you pay anyone to arrange treatment in India

Checked 13 September 2026.

You do not need to be an expert to check someone. You need a short list of questions, and a way to judge the answers. That is what this is.

The questions here are of two kinds.

• Some have a published official answer. The Government of India, its High Commission, or IVAC has already written it down. Where that is so, we quote it and link to the page we read it on, so you can check it yourself.
• The rest are answered on no official page we could find. Whether a hospital pays your agent, what a company's refund terms are, which patients it has sent before — we looked, and no government or IVAC page says. Ask those questions anyway. You are judging the answer, and the person giving it.

Print it. Read it on your phone while you are sitting in front of them. Ask the questions out loud. A person running an honest business will answer them without getting angry.

Get the answers in writing — a message, an email, a signed paper. Anything you can show later.

About money

1. "Exactly what am I paying for, item by item, in writing?"

Two official numbers exist, and you can check both.

• The Government of India charges Bangladeshi citizens no visa fee at all. IVAC: "Government of India does not charge any visa fees to citizens of Bangladesh and the Indian visa continues to remain free of charge for all Bangladeshi nationals." (source, read 11 Sept 2026)
• IVAC charges BDT 1,500, all inclusive, from 10.08.2025, as a service charge for handling the application (same source).

So an itemised list should not contain a line called "visa fee". If it does, ask which office receives that money.

2. "Are you charging me anything to get an appointment slot, or to make the visa come faster?"

If the answer is yes, you already have your answer. The Indian High Commission's published position:

"Any demand for extra payment for appointment slots or expedited visa delivery is fraudulent."

— IVAC Bangladesh, Advisory on Fraudulent Visa Appointment Slot Offers (source, read 11 September 2026)

3. "Who else pays you, and how much?"

Ask whether the hospital pays them, and how much. Being paid by a hospital is not automatically wrong. Being hidden about it is the problem, because money from a hospital can decide which hospital they send you to.

Ask it directly: do you receive money from the hospital, and how much? If the answer is "no", ask how they earn instead. Every business earns somehow. If nobody will tell you how, you do not know whose side they are on.

4. "Is this treatment price the hospital's own written quotation?"

There is a large difference between a number a company puts on its website and a number a hospital has signed. Ask for the hospital's own written estimate, on the hospital's letterhead, with a date.

We do not publish treatment prices on this site because we have not verified any. Anyone who quotes a price should be able to say who produced it.

5. "Where does my money go, and what do I get back if nothing happens?"

Ask for a bank account in a company name, not a personal account. Ask for a receipt. Ask what the refund is if the visa is refused. Get the answer in writing before you pay.

About the visa

6. "Can you guarantee me an appointment slot?"

Since 1 July 2026, appointment times at Indian visa centres in Bangladesh are assigned by the system, not chosen by the applicant:

"Time-slots shall be allotted automatically by the system in a sequential manner based on the daily configured appointment capacity of each visa application centre." Applicants "will not be required to manually select a time slot during appointment booking".

— IVAC advisory, reported by The Daily Star, 1 July 2026 (source)

So there is nothing here for them to guarantee that they actually control. And the Indian High Commission's published position on paying for a slot is in question 2: any demand for extra payment for appointment slots or expedited visa delivery is fraudulent.

For the full picture — the visa categories, the documents IVAC publishes and the one cost that is real — see the visa process a legitimate agent should be able to explain in our own words, sourced the same way as this page.

The document requirements are the part an agent is most likely to summarise for you. Our Indian medical visa document checklist tool lays out what each official source publishes for one situation at a time, with the page it came from and the date we read it beside every line, and it leaves the places where those sources disagree marked as disagreements rather than settling them for you. It sends your answers nowhere and stores them nowhere. Print it and bring it with you — then you are comparing their list against the government's, not against your memory of it.

7. "Do you work for the High Commission or for IVAC?"

They do not have agents. This is published:

"High Commission of India and Indian Visa Application Center do not have any agents."

— IVAC Bangladesh, 3 August 2025 (source)

The fraud advisory adds that no one from the High Commission in Dhaka or the Assistant High Commissions in Chittagong, Rajshahi, Khulna or Sylhet "ever contacts applicants through personal phone calls, social media, or third-party intermediaries to offer appointment slots in exchange for payment" (source).

8. "If the visa is delayed or refused after you file it, who is responsible?"

Know the answer before they give you theirs. IVAC's position, dated 30 March 2025:

"IVAC will not assume responsibility for any outcome of a visa application handled by agents on behalf of applicants, including delay and rejection."

(source)

If an agent files for you and it goes wrong, your only claim is against the agent. So ask what that claim is, in writing.

9. "Will I hold my own passport and my own application login?"

Your passport and your online application are yours. Ask to keep them.

Ask also for the number your own application produced. The online Indian visa application site for Bangladesh — which calls itself "the only website for application of Indian Visa to Indian Missions/ Posts in Bangladesh" — says the system generates an Application Id when you submit the form, and that you should keep it:

"Applicants are requested to keep this Application Id for further communications with the concerned Indian Mission."

— Indian Visa Application, indianvisa-bangladesh.nic.in (source, read 13 September 2026)

IVAC's application tracking site uses a different label: its box reads "Enter your Web file Number" (https://www.passtrack.net/, read 13 September 2026). We have not found an official page saying whether those two are the same number. So ask for both, and write them down yourself.

About the hospital — this is the section people skip

10. "Which hospital's name will be on my medical invitation letter?"

This is the most important question on this page.

A medical visa application requires a "Medical Invitation letter from India with specific date" (source, read 11 September 2026). And the visa is then tied to that hospital:

"Applicants seeking medical visa should visit the designated hospital only for which visa has been issued. Change of Hospital requires FRRO permission in India. Change of hospital without FRRO permission amounts to visa rules violation and may lead to restrictions on travel to India in future."

— IVAC Bangladesh, 24 April 2024 (source)

So whoever obtains your invitation letter has chosen your hospital. Ask which one, before the letter is written, not after.

11. "Has the hospital itself contacted me, or only you?"

Ask for something that comes directly from the hospital: an email from a hospital domain, a letter on hospital letterhead, a department phone number you can call yourself. Then call it yourself.

You can also check the name against a register before you call. NABH publishes one, free and with no login, and our tool for checking an Indian hospital's NABH accreditation walks that check in order. It tells you which of the three words we saw a record carry — Accredited, Certified or Empaneled — you are actually looking at, because one list holds all three and they are not the same thing. Answer that you are asking about a company arranging your treatment rather than about a hospital and it answers about the empanelment programme NABH runs for exactly that, which is about the company and not about any hospital. It does not look anything up for you and it contacts NABH at no point — it points you at NABH's own page and stops there. Nothing you answer is sent anywhere, and it names no hospital.

12. "What happens if I need to change hospital after I arrive?"

The answer is FRRO permission (source in question 10). The FRRO is the Foreigners Regional Registration Office: https://indianfrro.gov.in/frro/. If someone tells you it is easy, or that they can "manage it", ask them to write that down.

About them

13. "What is your company's legal name, address and registration number?"

Then check it. A company that will not tell you its own registered name is telling you something.

14. "Can I speak to two patients you sent last year?"

Not a written testimonial on a website — a phone number of a real person you can call. Screenshots and star ratings can be manufactured. A conversation is harder to fake.

If someone has already taken your money

IVAC publishes these channels. We are quoting them, not adding to them.

• Phone 01325089975 — for reporting suspicious contact about appointment slots (source).
• Email visahelp@ivacbd.com, info@ivacbd.com, visahelp.dhaka@mea.gov.in — given for reporting touts and agents (source).
• IVAC's feedback and complaint form: https://www.ivacbd.com/

Keep every receipt, message and screenshot. They are your evidence.

The rest of this series

• Indian medical visa from Bangladesh: the process — the four steps, the categories, what it costs, why appointments are the real constraint.
• Indian medical visa requirements from Bangladesh — the two official document lists, and the three ways they disagree about money.
• How many people can travel with a patient — the attendant routes, and the numbers each one publishes.
• After you arrive in India — FRRO registration, the hospital's own duty to report you, the e-Arrival Card.
• When treatment outlasts your visa — the Bureau of Immigration's one-paragraph extension rule, the blank certificate a treating hospital fills in, and the numbers it does not publish.
• Changing hospital on a medical visa — both offices say FRRO permission is required; neither publishes a form, a document list, a fee or a deadline for asking.
• Indian medical visa fraud from Bangladesh — what the High Commission itself says about agents, fees and appointment slots.

Now ask us the same questions

It would be dishonest to hand you a checklist and then avoid it. So, on the day this page was written:

• How do we earn? Listing is free; we intend to charge hospitals and medical facilitators per qualified lead they receive, not a commission on treatment. We have not earned any yet, and no price is set.
• How many providers are listed? None. We have not verified a single hospital, so we list none and name none.
• Do we sell visa appointment slots? No. See question 6.
• Do we charge patients? No.
• What do we not know? A great deal, and we have written the gaps into these pages rather than filling them in. See the "what we could not source" section on our medical visa page.

If we ever stop being able to answer these questions this plainly, stop trusting this page.

This is general information about process and paperwork, not medical advice. Infirmy does not diagnose, recommend a treatment, or tell anyone what care to seek.