A scandal is brewing in India’s neighbor, Nepal, and much of it is Nepal’s own making. I will have more on that shortly, but the short version is that the Nepali government is working to create a monopoly in its accreditation scheme that benefits one or two key individuals who have ties to that government. There’s been no apparent bottom to the depths that scandal will reach, including blackmail and extortion. But that is a story for another day.
Enabling that is, of course, India itself. Lacking a true accreditation structure in Nepal, that country has instead leaned on the existing accreditation scheme of India, led by the Quality Council of India (QCI). QCI is an official Indian government body that oversees the Indian accreditation body NABCB and the laboratory accreditation body NABL.
All of them are populated by absolute, criminally incompetent idiots.
At the heart of this story is the would-be Nepali “official” accreditation body, the Nepal Bureau of Standards and Metrology (NBSM). That body has been awash in controversy and scandal already, and is seeking to obtain formal, international recognition as well as to establish itself as a full-on monopoly in that country.
The problem is that NBSM has a sketchy past with accreditation. It has been, and may still be, accredited as a product testing body under ISO 17065 as well as a testing laboratory under ISO 17025. And this is where the Indians step in to muck everything up.
It had been reported that NBSM was claiming ISO 17021 and ISO 17065 accreditation issued by the Indian accreditation body, NABCB. The main issue was related to NBSM’s claimed IAF codes for the scope of its accreditation as well as whether the body was actually accredited at all. I filed a complaint ticket through the QCI’s system, which manages issues for NABCB, and things turned into a circular mess that was never resolved. In that filing, I presented evidence showing NBSM’s claims of accreditation.
First, NABCB’s Joint Director, Anand Deep Gupta, said that NBSM was fully accredited under both standards and attached copies of their certificates. The problem, however, was that ISO 17065 certificate provided by Gupta was clearly expired.
When I wrote to clarify, Gupta then corrected himself and verified that, in fact, “NBSM is presently operating without a valid NABCB accreditation for Product Certification activities under ISO/IEC 17065.” He then asked that I provide evidence that NBSM was claiming the accreditation, which I had already provided in my initial ticket entry.
When I pointed this out to Gupta, and said that his inability to understand basic information was turning into a complaint against NABCB itself, he just closed the ticket without any action.
So to be clear: we provided direct evidence that showed NBSM was (apparently?) making false claims of accreditation by NABCB, and the NABCB director, Anand Deep Gupta, did nothing. Here is the shot of the ticket in the QCI system, showing it was closed with my last entry left unanswered:
Next, we filed another QCI ticket with India’s test lab accreditation body, NABL, asking them to investigate NBSM. That request simply wanted to verify if NBSM had ISO 17065 or not. I sent that on Sept. 7, 2026.
Over two months later, NABL finally wrote back. I received a ticket response from their Assistant Director, Vivek Vardhan, who claimed he could not find NBSM in their system. Said Vardhan: “The said laboratory is currently not accredited by NABL.”
However, in the two-month interim, we found evidence to the contrary, showing NBSM was accredited by NABL. In fact, while they may have lost their accreditation (it’s not clear), they regained it in September of 2026, oddly enough, two days after I sent in my ticket. Sure enough, an entry for NBSM appears right on the NABL website, too, showing them as actively accredited.
So, in this case, the Director of NABL was unable to do a simple search in his own system — or even his own website! — to confirm the accreditation status of his client in Nepal.
Incompetence all around.
How is it criminal, though?
First, the NABCB shutdown of the complaint makes that body complicit in any fraud perpetrated by NBSM if they were, in fact, falsely claiming accreditation, as claimed by NABCB Director Gupta. Remember: he made that claim, not me. (So, since you’re reading this, NBSM: send any extortion messages to him, not me.) NABCB has a legal obligation to hunt down these false claims and stop them, but, as usual, they can’t be bothered. And, as usual, the IAF (“Global ACI”) and its regional body APAC, will do nothing.
Next, the claim by NABL that NBSM falsely claimed accreditation appears to be wholly untrue and amounts to defamation by the accreditation body of its own client. In India, defamation is criminal. (So, again, NBSM: send your threats to Director Vardhan, not me.)
What is clear is that no one at any of the QCI agencies — not the accreditation body NABCB nor the lab accreditation body NABL — knows what it is doing. In both cases, fully-salaried, titled “Directors” were incapable of doing simple searches in their own system and spewed false information without any verification.
These are not serious people.
Christopher Paris is the founder and VP Operations of Oxebridge. He has over 35 years’ experience implementing ISO 9001 and AS9100 systems, and helps establish certification and accreditation bodies with the ISO 17000 series. He is a vocal advocate for the development and use of standards from the point of view of actual users. He is the writer and artist of THE AUDITOR comic strip, and is currently writing the DR. CUBA pulp novel series. Visit www.drcuba.world
