How Gated Communities Are Overcoming Security Challenges in a Rapidly Urbanizing India In addition to ensuring that only the right people are let in, this technology also ensures that guards can focus on their core jobs of managing security and ensuring safety

India continues to urbanize at a rapid pace. In 2019, roughly 45 people will move to an urban area every minute of every day. To accommodate these numbers, India's largest cities are now dotted by large complexes that contain hundreds, if not thousands, of apartments.

These communities aren't your typical housing society. Their scale is more comparable to a shopping mall than an apartment building. It's common for such a community to have over a thousand delivery persons visiting each day. Add to this over a thousand daily staff, such as cooks, cleaners, drivers, and you have the chance for security lapses on an everyday basis.

In this article, we discuss what gated communities around the country are doing to overcome these challenges through a simple technology solution.

Letting the Right People in

With such dense, unidentified footfall on a daily basis, it becomes challenging for the security guards to keep a close tab on visitor activity and manage high traffic efficiently. Their immediate duty then is to make innumerable intercom calls for multiple visitor verifications and access approvals. The guards tend to get stuck in a loop of repeated unique encounters and calls for access approvals, which tend to deviate them from performing their core job of ensuring safety.

The solution to this problem, of course, is access management. However, the traditional, or corporate, version of access management is simply too impersonal for home use. Imagine needing an RFID card just to get home! Realizing the need for innovation in this space, a group of technologists and security professionals came together to create a seamless security management system that works perfectly for gated communities.

Now a simple app, with the use of passcodes and smart communication with the main gate, ensures that only persons approved by residents ever gain access to a community. In addition to ensuring that only the right people are let in, it also ensures that guards can focus on their core jobs of managing security and ensuring safety, instead of making incessant calls to verify visitors.

No Question of Overstay

Access management is only one part of the problem, of course. A person could, after all, have a legitimate reason to enter a premises, but no reason to, say, stay beyond 10 or 15 minutes. What happens if they overstay their welcome? When there are thousands of visitors, how do you check to see if everyone that inside continues to have reason to be there? This, of course, is an important requirement for communities, where thousands of children play, often without adult supervision.

The same security management system can now also create an alert if a cab or delivery executive remains within the community for an unreasonable period of time (this may be based on the number of deliveries within the community, for example). This way, the community can be sure that all such persons are within the community with a purpose.

Checkout Permission

Gated communities are usually spread over many acres of land, with a fully-functional clubhouse on the premises. This is the very reason why many people prefer such communities over smaller apartment complexes. At the same time, as it's difficult to keep a watch over kids playing around the community, parents are often nervous when their kids are away at play.

One major concern is that children could leave the community without the permission of their parents. With a security management solution in place, however, guards can, via the app, easily reach out to parents whose children are attempting to leave the community. This way the parents can rest easy as their kids play outside, safe in the knowledge that their permission will be sought if their children attempt to leave the community.

Such a security management solution is now commonly seen at gated communities across the country, with residents enjoying not only the enhanced security of such a system but also its convenience.