Sector

Residential

The system was installed by the developer, is maintained by whoever quoted lowest at the last AGM, and is administered by a committee that changes every two years. We design and maintain security for housing societies and residential estates in Mumbai. Specified for a building where nobody is employed to look after it.

A housing society buys a security system once and lives with it for a decade, under a committee that changes every year or two. The decisions that matter most are about what happens after the people who made them have left.

What actually goes wrong

Nobody in a society is paid to notice that a camera has stopped.

What fails in residential
What fails	Why it fails	What it costs
Half the cameras have been black for months	Nobody checks, because nobody's job includes checking.	An incident happens and the camera covering it stopped working last winter.
Retention is a fraction of what the committee believes	Set from the recorder default, or shortened when cameras were added and storage was not.	The committee is told ninety days. The recorder holds twelve.
The car park is covered for bays, not for people	Cameras aimed to see vehicles.	Where most society incidents happen, every face is in profile or behind a pillar.
Every domestic staff member has the same access as a resident	Zoning was never set up, because setting it up was somebody's unpaid evening.	The system records entries and cannot distinguish between a resident, a maid, a driver and a delivery.
The intercom and the gate do not talk to each other	Two systems bought at different times from different vendors.	The guard is the integration. When he is busy, the gate is open.
Nobody knows who installed it or what the AMC covers	Three committees have turned over since.	Every fault begins with collecting three quotations from scratch.

The morning after

Something happened in the building last night. The footage is not there.

This is the moment every committee eventually has. A vehicle damaged, a theft from a flat, a dispute in the car park, an intruder on CCTV that turns out not to be on CCTV at all.

The system looked fine. The lights on the front were on. Somebody had been paying an AMC. And the answer is that camera stopped working in March, or the retention was twelve days, or the recorder was full, or the one camera covering that corner was moved during the lift repair and never re-aimed.

Nobody is at fault. There was simply nobody whose job it was to look, and a residential building is the only kind that has systems worth ten lakhs and nobody employed to check them.

Get the system checked before you need it

What we carry here

Surveillance
- Gate, lobbies, lifts, car park levels, terrace and perimeter
- Car park cameras positioned for people, with vehicles as a by-product
- Retention verified against real recording, and stated to the committee in writing
Access control & entry
- Residents, domestic staff, drivers, contractors and visitors as separate groups
- A system a committee can administer without a specialist
- Gate and intercom that work together rather than through the guard
Fire & life safety
- Detection, alarm and interlocks for a building where people sleep
- Doors and lifts that respond to the panel
- Tested and recorded, with a schedule the committee holds
Networking
- Cameras and access on their own network, not on the society's broadband
- Recordings held where somebody can answer for them
- Because footage of residents is personal data whatever the size of the building

Building management is specified where the estate is large enough. AV covers clubhouse and common rooms where required.

The same six stages

A society has all six stages and one guard to run them.

01 Outside the gate Vehicles arriving all day, residents and visitors together.
02 Entry The gate. If this is wrong the guard becomes the bottleneck and the gate stays open.
03 Inside the building Lobbies, lifts, car park levels, stairwells. The car park is where it happens.
04 Who goes where Residents, staff, drivers, contractors, delivery. Five groups, usually one credential.
05 Work areas Common areas, plant rooms and the fire strategy for a building of sleeping families.
06 Control room The guard's cabin. Whether it can see anything, and whether anybody looks at it.

Proof

Somebody keyed a car in the visitor bay and there was no way to say who.

A residential society where the parking was covered, and the coverage was aimed at the bays rather than at the people walking between them. There was footage of a scratched car and nobody in the frame who could be identified.

The same pattern ran through the rest of the building. The children's play area, watched by a camera on a corner that showed the equipment and not the path in. The amenities, meant for residents only, with no way to tell a resident from a guest at the door. And the terrace gate, which is supposed to be locked after sunset and which nobody could prove had been.

A society does not need more cameras. It needs the four or five positions that answer the questions a committee actually gets asked.

Year seven

The knowledge leaves with every committee.

The person who understood the security system was on the committee two terms ago. The contractor who installed it stopped answering. The AMC was renewed with somebody cheaper who does not have the original drawings, and the drawings were never handed over anyway.

Nothing is neglected deliberately. The system simply outlives everybody's memory of it, and by year six nobody in the building can say what was installed, what it covers, or who to call.

Get the system checked before you need it.

We test every camera, recorder, reader and panel in the building, verify retention against real recording, and give the committee a signed condition report in plain language. Yours whatever you decide next.

The assessment is chargeable, quoted against the site, and adjusted in full against the first year if you take cover. Where cover is not taken, the fee covers our team’s time on site and the report we leave behind, and the report is yours either way.

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