The $57-billion Reliance Industries, the holding company led by Mukesh Ambani, has hired 16,000 former Indian defence personnel and commandos to protect its energy and economic assets.
These ex-military men, drawn from the army, navy and air force, are veterans of several operations including the Kargil war, the Akshardham (Ahmedabad) terrorist attack and 26/11 counterterrorist operations, according to Reliance sources who didn’t want to be named.
Reliance has created a new business vertical, christened Global Corporate Security (GCS), which apart from these services personnel, will include information security experts to protect the company’s data assets too. A company source told The Hindu that the IT experts are trained to deal with security challenges and technological risks the company will face in the future.
Mr. Ambani, India’s richest person with personal assets of $18.9 billion according to the Forbes Rich List, has Z-category security and his company’s Jamnagar refinery, one of the largest in the world, is protected by the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) since the time it received terror threats from across the border.
A Reliance official told The Hindu that since CISF personnel are posted at limited facilities of RIL (for example, the government has provided only 200 CISF personnel at Jamnagar for a facility that would require at least 10 times that much) and because the company has assets spread across India, the GCS would protect those. “GCS provides the leadership and the expertise to protect such a wide array of assets spread across the length and breadth of India,” the official said on condition of anonymity.
While the former military personnel will work under the GCS banner to protect physical assets, the Security Technology Solutions (STS) Group was created to develop solutions for enterprise security, the official added.
This team will develop a product- and platform-agnostic multimodal enterprise-wide access management and personnel tracking solutions in addition to biometrics-based registration and identification to minimise security risks. This group will also conduct video surveillance systems and develop situational awareness platforms.
To institutionalise these initiatives, RIL set up the Reliance School of Security Management (RSSM), in Nagothane, 110 km from Mumbai where it trains security executives in various disciplines, including physical fitness, information security-related technology, soft skills such as management, communication, leadership, and process engineering.
Nineteen batches have graduated from RSSM so far. One of the graduates, Avtar Ghumman, is now the head of RIL’s Global Security Operations Centre (GSOC).
The RIL Army also protects, via its other vertical – the Event Security Group (ESG) – high-profile events such as the Indian Premier League (IPL) and the Indian Soccer League (ISL) matches, RIL Annual General Meeting (AGM), events organised by the Reliance Foundation (RF), and the Dhirubhai Ambani International School (DAIS).
