Under Indian law, your contractor might own your code by default

I've been digging into how US founders handle IP ownership when they outsource dev work to India.

Under Indian copyright law, if you hire an independent contractor in India without a written IP assignment clause, the contractor owns the code by default. A verbal agreement or a generic freelance template doesn't transfer it. The US "work made for hire" assumption a lot of founders carry over simply doesn't hold in that jurisdiction.

I'm trying to figure out how much this actually bites people in practice versus how much it's a theoretical risk nobody hits. So I'm looking to talk to folks who've run dev work through India, agency or direct hire.

A few things I'm curious about:

How did you handle the IP side, if at all? Custom contract, template, or nothing formal?
Did it ever cause a problem, or come up during a raise, acquisition, or due diligence?
If you didn't set it up carefully, was that a deliberate risk call or just something nobody flagged?