How Netra and Shaz built via 8 for Northeast India families

Netra grew up in Sikkim. She knows what it means when a family decides to send someone south: the pride, the fear, the late-night questions about hostels, language, food, and whether anyone will pick up the phone if something goes wrong. She now lives in Kerala. That move was not theoretical. She has walked both sides of the distance via 8 exists to shorten.

In Kerala she saw what South India actually offers: campuses that train properly, hospitals that hire, cities that work if you arrive with a plan. She also saw how often Northeast families arrived through a cousin’s friend or a local agent, and how quickly trust broke when money, documents, or expectations went sideways.

Shaz is from Kerala. He knows the South the way operators do: cities, colleges, HR teams, and the unglamorous logistics of arriving well. He founded Escappa in the Northeast, then expanded across India and abroad. The network behind via 8 is not a list scraped from LinkedIn. It was built by moving people, solving problems on the ground, and keeping relationships that employers still answer.

When Netra and Shaz compared notes, the pattern was the same from both directions. Northeast graduates were already being hired, quietly, by South Indian hospitals, IT parks, and hotels. What they lacked was a named, accountable route: who screens, who briefed the parent, who is still on WhatsApp in week six. Employers wanted that talent without informal agents they could not audit.

That is the gap via 8 fills. Not a marketplace. A desk. College admission and jobs run as separate pipelines because a NEET counselling file and a nursing placement are not the same work, even when the family is the same.

Today, every via 8 file asks for a parent or guardian number. Status is trackable after login. Counselling is in plain language: fees, deposits, city, hostel, and who to call at eleven at night. When a placement or admission lands, the desk does not disappear. The first ninety days are part of the promise.

Eight states. One route. Not because the Northeast is one place (it is not), but because families from Arunachal to Tripura deserve the same standard of care when they choose the South.