Thirteen years of asking the same question: what can actually be proved?

WAD 101st Annual Conference, Cannes, September 2026.

Professional profile

Hardesh Bhardwaj founded Advance Detective Agency in New Delhi in 2013 and has led it since. He also leads the practices operating as Detective Agency India, Detective Agency Chandigarh and BugSweepingTSCM. New Delhi is where he is based; the work itself is not confined to it — engagements are taken internationally, and cross-border matters are run from one point of instruction with counterpart investigators in the countries concerned.

His own areas of work are corporate investigations, due diligence and background verification, fraud and internal-misconduct enquiries, field surveillance, missing-person tracing, and technical surveillance counter-measures.

On 5 September 2026 the World Association of Detectives named him Investigator of the Year, presented at the association's 101st Annual Conference in Cannes, France — a membership drawn from investigators and security professionals in more than 80 countries.

How the work started

The practice began as a small Delhi office taking personal and matrimonial matters, at a time when most Indian enquiry work was informal and undocumented. The decision that shaped everything after it was to write reports properly: dated observations, the source of each fact, and a plain statement of what could not be established. Corporate clients and law firms came because of that, not because of advertising.

Technical security followed the same way. Clients asked whether their boardrooms and vehicles were clean, and consumer detectors could not answer the question honestly, so the practice invested in instrumented sweeping and built a dedicated unit around it.

Working across borders

Enquiries increasingly do not stay in one country: a counterparty incorporated in one jurisdiction, a subject employed in another, a family matter split across two. Those are taken as a single instruction — scoped here, executed in each country by a deploying team or vetted counterpart investigators, and reported back as one document. What an investigator may lawfully do differs by jurisdiction, so those limits are established before the scope is written.

What he will not do

Interception of calls or messages, access to accounts, tracking without lawful authority, and impersonation of officials are not offered at any price. Enquiries that require them are declined with the reason explained. It costs work, and it is the reason the reports hold up when somebody contests them.

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