With the Indian banks deploying e- surveillance model for ATM’s, personnel manning ATMs are expected to see losing their jobs. The country will face serious unemployment issues with over two lakh personnel’s losing their job.
Axis Bank became first in list to implement the prevalent e surveillance model followed by the State Bank of India, Uco Bank and HDFC bank implementing e surveillance in security arrangement of their ATM. HDFC Bank that runs with same mechanism of security arrangement saves about 90% of its security costs allowing ATM”s to be monitored on a 24*7 basis.
The e-surveillance facility monitoring ATM”s have multiple sensors like motion sensor, removal sensor ,thermal sensor and breaking sensors provided with 2 to 3 CCTV’s and speakers in the ATM room. This makes way for two way communications during times of unauthorized activity with hooter alert between officials and the intruders through CCTV and speaker. At the same time the message will go to nearby police station and to the patrolling officer.
Nowadays Banks are into deploying response team to have frequent visits to the ATMs. Rajiv Anand, head of retail banking at Axis Bank states the e-surveillance solution to be more safe and sound with overall cost of Rs 5,000 per month compared to the previous expense that stood around Rs 36,000 per ATM including the charge for security guard’s working on three shifts per day.
While Uco Bank Executive Director Garg also makes clear that the bank will soon adopt the surveillance system to cut the costs. The Bank Employees Federation, expects 20,00 of its security personnel to go jobless in the next year starting with West Bengal where almost 370 people lost their job . Kunal Pande , KPMG partner claims that even though the surveillance brings in efficiency there is no assurance of quick action in the immediate environment .For this reason most of security guards are deployed to actively monitor the physical infrastructure .As of May , statistics shows about 1.84Lakhs of ATMs with e-surveillance of which one fourth is held by SBI.
