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Hi Joel, Thanks for getting back to me. The text came to me via a word document (font says Callibri) and then corrections via mark-up comments in the PDF I generated. I've turned on the World-Ready Composer and switched to a different Gurmuhki font which has corrected most of the issues. One character combo ਕ੍ਰ still is apprearing differently. See attached here 
Thank you for posting an interesting question! My apologies for the length of my response. If you won't read it, the short version is "Use the font Nirmala UI".
A corollary of Murphy's Law states that, if I claim that your question has to have an answer of either "number 1" or "number 2", then the answer will invariably be "number three." We might need an actual Punjabi type nerd in here to tell us if my conclusions are correct, but I am confident that I can get us 90% of the way there.
So: we can see the glyph in question in live text, in your post. If anyone out there isn't sure that their Gurmukhi glyph is rendering correctly, we can all go paste it into the Unicode Text Rendering Reference System:
Says right there that the font Lohit renders the composite glyph correctly. Lohit is a Red Hat font, so it's available from the Fedora Project. I had to dig for a bit - I found some dead links - but you can download it from here if you have the right decompression tools installed to unpack a Linux tarball.
I installed Lohit Punjabi from that package, as well as a few other Gurmukhi-supporting fonts, and then made a comparison image for our benefit. In doing so, I think I have found broad incompatabilities between these fonts and the font rendering engines in InDesign. Watch what happens to the Lohit Punjabi in the first text frame when I resize the frame:
Both variants can be found inside Lohit (or at least both variants can be built from combining bits), when I'm browsing it via the Glyphs menu.
When you say it's rendering correctly in Word, then I'm willing to bet that it's not in Calibri, but actually in the Microsoft-provided font "Nirmala UI" which appears in my demo above. If you have some complex-script keyboards installed in Windows, then your MS Word Fonts dialog will show you this:
To go on: if something is buggy on the Internet, chances are that people are talking about it. And lo, they are! I found this bug report on GitHub for the Noto Sans Gurmukhi font, discussin the very issue you're facing. That bug was closed and split into three separate discussions, the first of which has this interesting comment from a font developer:
"This may be by design. Some typesetting systems were unable to physically connect the subscripts to the base letter in the way normally done in manuscript and in handset metal type, so the subscript sat below the letter with a small gap like this. Notably, Linotype Gurmukhi followed this in the transition from hot metal to early digital typesetting, so Punjabi readers were familiar with it from newspapers."
So, I think that this is probably okay with either rendering. We aren't Punjabi type nerds, so we don't know for sure, but that's my guess. This kind of thing happens all the time; a given writing system couldn't be reproduced with mid-20th-century typesetting technologies (check out "hot metal typesetting" if you're curious and haven't read about it before). So, people – typesetters, people reading newspapers, etc. – became accustomed to workarounds. Those workarounds wind up getting preserved in digital type; it's a "survival", a practice that used to be a perfectly reasonable hacky workaround that is no longer necessary, but we keep doing it because That's The Way We've Always Done It.
However, I doubt that your reviewer feels that way. So in your shoes, I would just use Nirmala UI as my Gurmukhi font, to keep the reviewer from dinging me for incorrect rendering. I probably wouldn't try to start a disagreement about typesetting with my reviewer (depending, of course, on how salty I felt that day). I will see if we can't get someone who actually knows to review my post to see how close to the mark I came. Once that is done, I will go file a bug report over at indesign.uservoice.com.
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