Elliot Hannon reports from New Delhi on the increasing demand for female security guards in India.Listen

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LAURA LYNCH: India is all too familiar with bombings like the ones that shoot Jakarta today.  Two luxury hotels were among the main targets of terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year.  One effect of the attacks was to spark an increase in demand for private security guards around the country.  And as Elliot Hannon explains in this report from New Delhi, many of the new guards are women.

KANCHAN SINHA:  My name is Kanchan Sinhan.

ELLIOT HANNON:  Kanchan Sinhan is buttoned up to her chin in a white dress shirt and tie on a sweltering summer afternoon.  Clutching a walkie talkie, she patrols outside the India Habitat Center, an arts and cultural hub in New Delhi.  At each entrance, uniformed guards size up every visitor.  On her rounds, Sinha pauses to observe as cars line up to be inspected – inside and out – before entering the complex.   Sinha oversees nearly 100 other guards, male and female.  She works for Securitas, one of the largest of some 15,000 security operators that have sprouted up across the country.  Security guards and metal detectors have become a common sight here in the past decade.  But the deadly attacks in Mumbai late last year, known here as 26-11, have stocked a demand for private security.  AK Sakuja is in charge of recruitment for Securitas.

AK SAKUJA:  Post 26-11 there was a sudden requirement of getting some safety and security officers, so we extensively advertised to get graduate officers to come and take our training and be deployed at sites like hotels, where all of this occurred.

HANNON:  So these days, if you enter a hotel in New Delhi, expect a thorough pat down.  The same goes for shopping malls.  And it’s this bodily contact in a traditional country like India that’s created the hot job market for female guards.  Kris Van den Briel heads Securitas’ South Asian operation.

KRIS VAN DEN BRIEL:  We typically would need these women workers to do frisking on female employees or female visitors, for example in malls, so there is an increase.

HANNON:  And the demand is outpacing supply.  So in a rare turnabout, female guards are getting paid more than their male counterparts – up to 20 percent more.  Still, it’s not that easy to find women who are willing to work late shifts, says Amit Dar of Securitas.  For one thing, their families don’t like it.

AMIT DAR:  It’s not really acceptable by society at large, at least at the lower level, for their wives and their sisters to be working overnight.  That’s something I think, as a society, will evolve over the next couple of years.

HANNON:  Security guard Kanchan Sinha says her family is already on board.

SINHA:  My husband is very happy that I’m doing this job.  I was a guard, now I’m a supervisor.  And I’m hoping for another promotion.

HANNON:  As Sinha turns to get on with her rounds, the male guards stand at attention and salute.  For The World, I’m Elliot Hannon in New Delhi.

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