The Indian accreditation body NABCB has shut down a complaint related to false accreditation claims by the Nepal Bureau of Standards and Metrology (NBSM), refusing to take action as required under ISO 17011.
Oxebridge has become more active in accreditation work in the country of Nepal, and uncovered that the NBSM website makes unusual claims about its accreditation. The body, an official branch of the Nepal government, provides ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and other certificates while also accrediting product testing bodies. It claims to hold ISO 17021-1 and ISO 17065 accreditation issued by NABCB.
The choice to use an Indian accreditation body was necessitated by the fact that, until recently, Nepal had no national accreditation body of its own. The Nepal Accreditation Forum (NAF) has since been formed and achieved IAF recognition, but that only occurred recently.
NABCB is managed by the Quality Council of India.
Oxebridge found that on its website, NBSM cited IAF codes for its product certification activities, which is unusual. IAF codes are only used when scoping ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 management system certificates, and not used for product certification activities. This led Oxebridge to investigate if NBSM held actual accreditation at all.
Oxebridge filed a formal ticket with NABCB to obtain clarity. In that ticket, Oxebridge provided proof that NBSM was currently claiming ISO 17065 accreditation by NABCB and asked about the IAF codes.
That ticket was answered by NABCB’s Joint Director, Dr. Anand Deep Gupta. Dr. Gupta confirmed that NBSM was accredited as a product CB and provided a scope of ISO 17065 accreditation for the Nepali body.
The certificate was expired since December 2025, however, and Dr. Gupta did not notice. Within the ticket system, Oxebridge notified Dr. Gupta of this fact.
Dr. Gupta then wrote a bizarre response in which he repeated Oxebridge’s assertion that NBSM was not accredited, essentially repeating what Oxebridge had originally reported them for, but as if he was the one who had uncovered it. He wrote:
Accordingly, NBSM is presently operating without a valid NABCB accreditation for Product Certification activities under ISO/IEC 17065.
Dr. Gupta then asked for evidence that NBSM was claiming it held ISO 17065 accreditation, something Oxebridge had already provided NABCB in its first ticket entry.
Oxebridge then responded one last time, providing the original evidence once again and augmenting that with additional evidence showing that NBSM was still falsely claiming ISO 17065 accreditation as late as April 2026. Oxebridge then pointed out multiple violations of ISO 17011 by NABCB itself, which is required to announce publicly and “without request” any CB whose accreditation has been suspended or withdrawn, and to “take measures” to stop the offending CB from misrepresenting their accreditation. Since December 2025, NABCB had done neither.
Dr. Gupta ignored that entry entirely for nine days. Now, NABCB has closed the ticket entirely without taking any action and without any formal explanation.
Pattern of Incompetence
In checking the NABCB website today (19 June 2026), an annotation has been added to the NBSM scope of accreditation indicating it is expired, but NBSM was not added to the list of expired and withdrawn accreditations on the official listing (here), as required by 17011. Instead, NABCB is still listed on the page of accredited bodies.
Oxebridge has since found multiple cases of other bodies who hold expired accreditation, and yet where NABCB has done nothing. Eko Guarantee Pvt. Ltd. holds ISO 17065 accreditation by NABCB, but that expired in July of 2025. Nevertheless, Eko continues to market its accreditation, despite it having lapsed.
The inspection bodies Moody International (India) and Rina India both had their accreditations expired in May of 2026, but continue to operate normally.
The pattern suggests that NABCB has lost control of its accredited client base, allowing them to continue to act as fully accredited bodies long after their accreditation has actually lapsed. It is not clear if this is intentional corruption of merely incompetence on the part of NABCB.
Public Safety at Risk
Deleting formal complaints is a common tactic by IAF member accreditation bodies, and has been silently endorsed, behind the scenes, by the IAF leadership itself. This ensures that any AB that violates ISO 17011 faces no consequences, since enforcement of ISO 17011 eventually falls on IAF and its regional bodies. In this case, the IAF regional body APAC, led by Graeme Drake, would be responsible, but Drake routinely refuses to process complaints he arbitrarily deems “vexatious.” Drake’s salary is partly based on how many ABs he can run through APAC, so he has a financial interest in ensuring that its members are never investigated.
However, the refusal by ABs to publicly announce when a client CB is no longer accredited seems to be a new tactic. The US-based (but Indian-run) accreditation body IAS refused to announce the suspension of AS9100 CB KSQA twice: once in 2025 and again in 2026. When this was reported to IAS as a violation of ISO 17011, the management of IAS deleted the complaint without action.
The IAF — now rebranded as Global ACI — also refused to take action in that case, too, despite it raising questions about aircraft product safety.
In the Nepal case, there may be little NABCB could do, anyway, without causing an international incident. NABCB is formally chartered by the Indian government, while the NBSM is an official department of that country’s government. The IAF multilateral recognition agreement (MRA) creates an untenable, and unrealistic, expectation that one nation’s body may declare another nation’s body of being “invalid” due to breaches of that document, which may not be legally enforceable in any court. Such a public claim could lead to lawsuits and international conflict, so the IAF generally does not enforce its MRA, even as it markets the MRA to justify its own tax-exempt status and to make deals with international governments and NGOs.
Oxebridge has since obtained unverified information that, meanwhile, an executive from within the NBSM is forming his own accreditation body, the Nepal Accreditation Centre, with the intent of then accrediting NBSM directly, bypassing NABCB entirely. This would violate ISO 17011, as the executive would be accrediting his own department, but — again — there is little the IAF or APAC would do to stop them.
For now, however, this means that all product certificates issued by NBSM are invalid, despite whatever that country’s government might say to the contrary. NBSM has accredited manufacturers of instant noodles, mineral water, paint, soya and sunflower oils, water storage tanks, cement, steel, and even beer — all of which are now suspect.
This puts the lives of Nepalis at risk for the distribution of deadly products that do not actually meet crucial quality requirements.
