Booming business: Private security on the rise in the city

Number of private security guards in metropolis nearly twice that of policemen, say speakers.

KARACHI: Security is a sector that has been increasingly privatised, claimed Adnan Afaq, the managing director of the Pakistan Credit Rating Agency (PCRA) on Saturday.

Speaking at a discussion titled 'Changing Paradigm of Private Security Services in Pakistan', Afaq revealed that there were 50,000 private security guards in the city, as opposed to a mere 27,000 policemen. "Hiring private security guards is not out of the ordinary even in the US, where they often handle military logistics," he added.



"Most private security businesses pay their employees only Rs12,000 per month and provide them with no training," asserted defence analyst Ikram Sehgal, who owns a private security company himself. "If there is an emergency, the guards have nothing to fall back upon."

He claimed that his own company trained its employees and paid them well, even providing medical insurance for free treatment at hospitals across the city, giving them incentives to stay with him.

Meanwhile, Institute of Business Administration director Dr Ishrat Husain commended Sehgal for seeing the entrepreneurial opportunity within Karachi's security predicament. "Who could have imagined private security in the 1980s?" he questioned.

He added that security companies should be graded and should offer high, medium and low security packages to enable their customers to select the option best suited to them.

Afaq, whose company evaluates businesses on the basis of their performance, further discussed the need for businesses to call in external experts to assess their performance and gauge their risks. "There were 20 families who owned business empires here in the 1960s," he said. "Thirteen of those empires failed to evaluate their risks, so they disappeared."

Other speakers at the event were Tawfiq Husain, the secretary-general of Pakistan Banks Association, Privatisation Minister Muhammad Zubair and former chairperson of the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan Khalid Mirza.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 27^th, 2014.