Dear Readers
February has been a very interesting month. SECURITY TODAY, our flagship monthly publication on Security Management, organised a high impact Roundtable for India’s leading players in the Rs 40,000 Crore (USD 6 Billion) Indian manned guarding industry, and top CSOs and end users from corporates such as Bank of America, PepsiCo, GAIL, Reliance, Maruti Suzuki, Apple, Concentrix and Punjab National Bank participated in it. A gazetted notification of the Ministry of Labour and Employment in January 2017 prompted this discussion. The main issues discussed were the re-categorisation of private security guards as ‘Skilled Workers’ and fixing the minimum wage payable to the personnel engaged for ‘Watch & Ward’ duties at Rs. 637 per day.
Great! But, what does this mean to the Electronic Systems Industry?
This means that the millions of private security guards could henceforth be eligible to get almost Rs. 20,000 per month as wages for an 8 hour shift! This disruption in the physical security ecosystem had the CSOs wanting to know that if they were to pay that kind of wage, would the IQ, the training, and the skill set of the security guards also henceforth improve? The Roundtable yielded the the answer as definitely ‘Yes’, but it will take time for this to happen, as upgrading skills is not an overnight process.
This also means that since payment of enhanced wages to security guards would now become a compliance issue rather than one of choice, the CSO’s could resort to reducing the headcount of security personnel employed by them to reduce their recurring expenditure and instead enhance their capital investment in security automation. Industry segments such as video surveillance, access control, intrusion detection and guard monitoring systems would stand to expand with the additional demand thus created. A healthy growth of the electronic protection systems industry in India over the next five years is therefore, almost inevitable.
The systems industry may, by the end of this year, also have to adhere to meeting national standards, as the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) prepares to release quality standards for the video surveillance, access control and intrusion alarm systems industry which will be at par with the prevalent global standards. Apart from introducing quality standards for the manufacture and testing of items falling in these domains, the bureau shall also be releasing standards for the application of the electronic protection systems. This means that the systems integrators would now have to design, install and service electronic protection systems to certain quality benchmarks. It will also mean that the technical workforce employed in this sector would need to be certified to possess the requisite skills to be able to design, install and service such systems.
All in all, I see some exciting times ahead for the private security industry in India, as professionalism and quality benchmarks set in. I also foresee consolidation happening within the systems industry in the near future.
Till we meet next month, stay safe and keep others safe.
G B Singh
Group Editor
Email: gbsingh@1stasset.org
Follow me on @EditorGB
Connect with me on Linkedin.com/in/gbsingh9
