This article explores the evolving STQC compliance framework and its impact on India’s video surveillance industry. While mandatory certification aims to strengthen cybersecurity and standardization, the sector faces challenges including chipset shortages, certification delays, rising costs, and project slowdowns, alongside growing uncertainty over implementation and enforcement for DVRs, NVRs, and network devices.
India’s surveillance sector, and especially its CCTV segment, is going through an interesting phase in which it has reached a turning point where it must adapt itself to some new regulatory policies in the field. Indeed, some recently passed rules aim to enforce stronger compliance practices, establish cybersecurity measures, and ensure a safe and dependable surveillance structure in India.
While the transition period allowed companies to adapt to new compliance standards during more than two years, they did not expect global challenges that made this process rather complicated.
This evolving situation calls for a balanced and pragmatic approach, one that aligns national security priorities with on-ground realities faced by businesses and stakeholders across the surveillance ecosystem.
Indeed, mandatory STQC certification of surveillance devices will become one of the crucial aspects that every company must observe in order to sell its products legally within India’s borders. The new measures will contribute to improving the cybersecurity of infrastructure as a part of India’s broader plans to build a reliable and self-sufficient digital landscape.
Unfortunately, it seems that despite the good intention of lawmakers to make surveillance products safer and more secure, the process of implementation may be rather challenging due to several problems that the surveillance industry has to face currently.
Current Market Challenges
The surveillance industry is currently facing multiple external pressures:
- Persistent Chipset Shortage: The global semiconductor shortage continues to disrupt electronics manufacturing. CCTV cameras, being dependent on chipsets, are directly affected, leading to delays and increased costs.
- Geopolitical Tensions: The ongoing conflict in West Asia has disrupted global logistics, affecting shipping routes, costs, and delivery timelines, which causes major inconveniences for businesses.
- STQC Certification Bottlenecks: Limited government-approved testing labs have resulted in significant delays in certification, impacting product availability and project timelines. Due to the strict requirements for device certification and approval, manufacturers cannot deliver their products in time, which may lead to some problems with implementing new infrastructure projects.
- Implementation Timing Challenges: Although the government provided over two years for compliance, global disruptions have made timely implementation difficult.
- Higher Implementation Cost of Projects: Higher implementation costs are becoming a key concern for the industry. Rising prices, unavailability of materials, and ongoing supply chain disruptions are collectively increasing the overall cost of projects, making deployments more challenging.
- Security Adoption Pressure Due to Inflation: Security adoption may face a slowdown as the challenge is not limited to the surveillance sector alone. The global economy is under pressure due to inflation control challenges driven by the West Asia war scenario, with prices of essential items increasing by around 10% or more, which is impacting overall investment sentiment.
7. Rising Installation Costs: Installation costs are also rising as users today are more cautious and increasingly focused on best practice based deployments. This is creating a need for installers and engineers to upgrade their capabilities, become more professionally trained, and be better prepared to handle more demanding client expectations.
Industry sources indicate that nearly 60–70% of surveillance projects have seen delays in recent months, largely due to limited availability of STQC-certified products.
- Industry estimates suggest that 60–70% of ongoing CCTV and surveillance projects (especially in government, smart city, and infrastructure segments) have experienced delays or slowdowns in the last few months due to compliance-related uncertainties.
- Several tenders are either being re-evaluated or temporarily paused until clarity on certified product availability.
While interacting with channel partners reported a growing inventory mismatch, where available stock cannot be deployed in new projects due to certification requirements.
- Many distributors and system integrators are facing inventory mismatches, non-certified stock cannot be deployed in new projects.
- Fresh imports or manufacturing batches are getting delayed due to certification bottlenecks.x
The overall industry sentiment remains cautious. While stakeholders support long-term standardization, short-term disruptions such as delays and cost pressures are creating uncertainty, especially for smaller players. We all believe that there is a pressing need to implement some innovative strategies that would allow regulating surveillance activities in India efficiently.
India’s surveillance market stands at a critical juncture. The new compliance norms have the potential to transform the ecosystem positively and augment national security. However, current global and operational challenges require a pragmatic and collaborative approach to make this happen.
Lastly, while the certification regime for cameras is now clearly taking shape, questions still remain regarding the scope, timelines, and enforcement framework for DVRs, NVRs, and other network devices within the video surveillance ecosystem. Although STQC documentation does cover such devices under the broader IoTSCS framework, the industry continues to await greater clarity on implementation and ground-level enforcement. Until then, it remains a wait-and-watch situation.
