India’s Private Security Metamorphosis
27 Nov 2009
By Jody Ray Bennett for ISN
Thousands of young men throughout India begin each day in blue uniforms that closely resemble that of official police officers, and often armed with little more than batons and radios, they patrol, survey, search and check guests and clients of some of the largest multinational firms in the country.
These young men are escorting VIPs, checking luggage and bags with bomb-sniffing canines, surveying landscapes with binoculars and night-vision goggles and even using hi-tech electronic equipment to scan for cyberinvasions and other network threats for a multitude of private clients.
The company they work for is busy assessing security risks for elite multinationals doing business in India while providing them with personal, private security. In the event of an emergency, the external pagecompany claims it will deploy a “quick response team” dispatched through a 24-hour manned security control room.
In an increased blurring of the lines between security guard services and the private security personnel of companies that often raise eyebrows in western media, several Indian firms are preparing to earn their spot in the global private security industry.
Meet external pageTerraForce Security Services, India’s newest private security company. Set apart from many of the other private security firms throughout India, TerraForce was recently formed by Indian billionaire Kushal Pal Singh to protect the assets of external pageDLF Group, India’s largest real estate company. DLF states that it is by far the “largest” in terms of “revenues, earnings, market capitalization and developable areas in India,” so it is hardly difficult to identify the company’s vested interest in protecting its businesses, projects and assets in a country that even the external pageUS Department of State has said is “ranked among the world’s most terrorism-afflicted countries.”
external pageAccording to the New York Times, TerraForce is hiring “as many experts as it can,” some of which include “former National Security Guards, the black-clad commandos who reclaimed the Mumbai hotels” in the aftermath of the external page2008 Mumbai attacks, and in a statement from TerraForce president and chief executive Harsh Wardhan, the company is “importing instructors from the Israeli army and the United States Marine Corps.”
Anti-terrorism is big business
Much like the private security industry boom that was experienced throughout North America and Europe in the aftermath of 9/11, India also experienced a rapid increase in demand for security in the period following the Mumbai attacks.
According to India’s external pageCentral Association of Private Security Industry (CAPSI), as of June 2009 India’s private security external pageindustry had grown to “approximately 5.5 million security guards employed by about 15,000 security companies [and] as an industry, is now the country’s largest corporate taxpayer.”
The emergence of companies like TerraForce represents India’s ability to quickly create private forces to respond to perceived gaps in its national security. However, India’s private security industry is rather unique to the degree that it was once made up of mostly unarmed, static security guards that patrolled apartment buildings, hotels and other businesses and are now transforming into armed, anti-terrorism units.
“India's [private military and security] market has gotten very interesting since the Mumbai attacks a year ago. What used to be a country guarded by loosely trained, ‘external pagelathi’-equipped ‘external pagechowkidars’ that guarded individual homes and apartment complexes is transforming to one attempting to address and mitigate sophisticated terrorism,” Shlok Vaidya, analyst and author of external pageNaxliteRage.com, told ISN Security Watch.
“This has meant unprecedented growth as the market adapts to these new demands,” said Vaidya.
external pageOne report noted that “Even before the [Mumbai attack], the industry was experiencing an annual growth rate of 25 percent due primarily to the country’s infrastructure development [and CAPSI] now estimates an annual growth rate of 40 percent.”
Essential training
But even as the industry grows, external pagesome critics maintain that much of India’s private security companies are still unprepared to respond to threats such as terror attacks. Part of the reason could be the time it takes to prepare employees of these countries to adequately respond in the wake of a crisis. And in the industry’s rapid growth over the last year, private companies are recruiting India’s youth to begin careers that might quickly become India’s first line of defense against unconventional attacks.
In March 2009, external pageHomeland Security Newswire reported that these young men who were “recruited at random […] from India’s small farming communities and thrown a uniform,” must now “prove who they are, pass a medical exam, and show they can read and write and do elementary math, [and while] there are no rigorous investigations into a recruit’s background or character, security firms argue [for] mandatory training courses [to] help weed out the weak and corrupt from the applicants.”
This external pageultimately resulted in the state’s Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) training many of those new applicants to “to combat terror strikes.” According to a external pagerecent report by the Times of India, a senior official with the ATS stated that the employees it had trained would be “allowed at multiplexes, cinema halls, banks and other prominent private establishments” and that it’s training program would “definitely enable them [private security personnel] to assist police in tackling terror.” external pageCAPSI is now scrambling to help modernize and legitimize the development of the industry.
“Smaller companies with less funding are finding out the most useful role they can play in guarding social infrastructure (malls, movie theaters and banks) is to act as a highly trained information sensor for more heavily armed and better trained central police forces or special ops. Instead of chasing big weapons, small outfits are looking for secure, strong radio systems to report crimes or real time terror info. This is what they train on,” Vaidya told ISN Security Watch.
In many of the western private military and security companies, employees typically have previous police or military experience, which is almost always a requirement. In India, however, the dynamic has shifted in which young men can circumvent state police or military enlistment and go straight to private companies, which are in turn trained by state forces.
external pageAccording to one source, India’s private security personnel begin making approximately 4,000 rupees, or $82 per month, meaning that “the typical security guard starting out in India will make approximately $984 in a country with a per capita income of $2,900 a year.” Some private security companies are even external pagetraining Indians for employment as armed guards in western countries.
For now, India’s private security market is still in a developmental stage. If certain market forces remain intact, India’s private security industry could soon become the state’s first private line of defense against various security threats.
“The goal of the PMC market in India isn't to supplant governance, but rather to enable it. While these [private security personnel] aren't the heavily armed, highly-trained western PMCs, they are mission-critical information nodes. They join the variety of other private forces such as land owner militias, insurgencies and the underworld that, combined with the central government infrastructure, act as a government and enable life in India today,” Vaidya said.