
The National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL) under the Quality Council of India (QCI), from mid-2017, will begin using Global Document Type Identifiers (GDTI) encoded in QR codes on all accreditation certificates issued by them.
NABL provides accreditation of laboratories towards testing and calibration in all major fields of Science & Engineering, including medical testing. Approximately 6000 accreditation certificates are issued by them yearly.
Currently, NABL uses hologram stickers on their certificates but face limitations such as—no reliable means to verify authenticity of certificates as it doesn’t enable data capture; similar type of stickers can be easily purchased from the open market as there isn’t much standardisation in hologram designing, plus NABL incurs recurring costs for purchasing stickers every year, all of which will be overcome with the GDTI/QR code implementation as the barcode would get printed directly on each certificate.
The decision to adopt GS1 standards to verify the authenticity of their certificates, over their current hologram solution, is based on the data capture capability and security provided by GS1 standards.
By using GDTI’s encoded in QR codes, citizens and businesses can easily verify the authenticity of certificates by using any barcode reader app on their smartphones and retrieve certificate details such as the validity period of the accreditation, date of issue, accreditation received in accordance to which ISO/IEC standard etc.