Security & Compliance
Is Your Security Vendor Actually PSARA-Licensed? A Verification Checklist for Hyderabad Committees
Verifying a security vendor’s PSARA licence takes one email and about ten minutes. Ask for the licence certificate, its expiry date, the training tie-up and a register extract, then confirm the licence with the Telangana Controlling Authority, whose office is listed on the Ministry of Home Affairs licensing portal. Four documents, and the Act entitles you to see most of them.
Most managing committees in Hyderabad have never asked. The guard is at the gate, the invoice arrives monthly, and the licence question simply never comes up — until it does. In April 2026 the Telangana Intelligence Department and Kachiguda police inspected a Hyderabad agency’s office and booked its owner for supplying guards and supervisors without the mandatory licence, a case reported at the time by NewsMeter. Enforcement here is real, and it is the client’s deployment that gets inspected.
The law is short, and it is on your side
The governing statute is the Private Security Agencies (Regulation) Act, 2005 — a central Act, administered state by state. Section 3 has each state government appoint a Controlling Authority — an officer not below the rank of Joint Secretary in the state Home Department, or an equivalent officer — who grants and cancels licences; in Telangana that is the Additional Director General of Police (Intelligence), listed on the MHA portal’s State/UT Controlling Authorities page. Section 4 then makes the position blunt: no person shall carry on or commence the business of a private security agency without a licence.
Four sections matter to you as a client, and none of them requires a lawyer to read:
- Section 12 — the licence must be exhibited. Every agency has to display its licence, or a copy, in a conspicuous place of business. Asking for that copy is not an imposition; it is the ordinary operation of the Act.
- Section 15 — the register. The agency must maintain a register with the names, addresses, photographs and salaries of every guard and supervisor under its control, plus the list of clients it supplies.
- Section 17 — the photo identity card. Each guard must be issued one, must carry it, and must produce it on demand.
- Section 10 — who may be a guard. Anyone dismissed from the armed forces, a state police organisation, government service or another security agency on grounds of misconduct or moral turpitude cannot be employed as a guard or supervisor.
What to actually ask for
Put these five items in the tender response, not a phone call. A licensed agency produces them in a day; an unlicensed one produces excuses.
- The licence certificate, with the issuing state’s Controlling Authority visible on it. Read the expiry date rather than assuming the licence is current — section 7 fixes the term at five years unless it is cancelled earlier under section 13.
- The state. A licence issued by another state’s authority does not cover deployment in Telangana. This is the single most common gap in a competitively priced bid.
- The training tie-up. Section 7 requires an applicant to ensure training is available for its guards and supervisors, and section 11 lets the state make that a licence condition — in practice, a memorandum of understanding with an approved training institute. The Private Security Agencies Central Model Rules, 2020 align guard training to the National Skill Qualification Framework.
- A register extract for the guards proposed for your site — names, photographs, verification status. You do not need the salaries of the agency’s entire book; you need the people who will stand at your gate.
- Statutory registrations — EPF and ESI. An agency that is licensed but not remitting provident fund is a different problem arriving later, usually as a labour claim you get named in.
Verify it yourself, independently
The Ministry of Home Affairs runs the national licensing portal at psara.gov.in, through which state Controlling Authorities issue licences. It publishes the contact for every State and Union Territory’s Controlling Authority and state-wise licence counts, but no public per-agency search — so take the licence number and issuing authority from the certificate and confirm them in writing with the Telangana Controlling Authority, rather than accepting a scanned PDF at face value. A certificate image is the easiest document in this entire list to fabricate.
If the authority’s answer and the paper certificate disagree, stop before you sign anything. That five-line email is a great deal cheaper than discovering the discrepancy after an incident.
The easiest check needs no paperwork at all
Walk to the gate on a weekday evening and ask the guard on duty for his identity card. Section 17 says he must be carrying it; the duty to produce it on demand runs to the Controlling Authority, not to you, so write “produce on request” into your contract. Do the same on the night shift, with the reliever. A deployment where nobody can produce a card is not a documentation problem — it is a sign that the people on your property were never put through the process the Act describes.
Where this matters most, and where it doesn’t
Worth doing now if: you are re-tendering security, you inherited the incumbent agency from the developer at handover, your guard roster changes faces often, or your vendor has never volunteered a licence copy.
Less urgent if: you already hold a current licence copy with a verified portal record, your contract names the licence number, and you re-check it at each renewal. In that case this is an annual five-minute task, not a project.
Not a fit at all for: a single guard engaged privately and directly by a household. The Act regulates agencies supplying security as a business, not an individual employer.
PropSquare deploys and supervises security teams across Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai — see security services in Hyderabad for how a managed deployment is structured, and the guide to security guard cost in Hyderabad for what a compliant deployment actually costs. Statutory positions above are quoted from the Act and the 2020 Central Model Rules as published by the Ministry of Home Affairs; confirm the Controlling Authority’s current contact on the MHA portal before filing anything.
