Emergency evacuation headcount system india · what it has to do, what you will be quoted, and what none of it answers
The siren goes at 11:00. Four hundred people walk to the muster points. Supervisors count heads on paper, the numbers do not reconcile, and for the next 14 minutes nobody in that plant can say whether a person is missing or a line is wrong. Then someone wanders in from the canteen. That is the gap.
Surveyed, installed and commissioned by our own engineers.
Three deployment models, and nobody is subcontracted.
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01 What the market looks like
There is no detection-accuracy figure on this page. None has been measured in a way that would survive a question from your Plant Head, so none appears.
6 of 6
Systems we measured in this category that read a badge, a tag or a turnstile
2
Drills a year at a major accident hazard installation · the six-month interval in MSIHC rule 13(4)
100+
Plants and sites running VijAI on cameras already installed
Source · VijAI module demand register, PulseAI, harvested 13 September 2026, and the MSIHC Rules. Cell 1 counts observed vendors on one query. Cell 3 counts installed sites. Neither is an outcome.
02 The requirement
Not record attendance. Close a count. Those are different jobs and almost everything sold into this category does the first one.
The drill is the part the law already settles for you. Every six months at a major accident hazard installation, tested, recorded, filed, and reported to the authority. Nobody argues about the drill. What no instrument hands you is the method for being certain, at 11:04, that four hundred people walked out and four hundred people are standing in front of you.
So the specification is short and it is unforgiving. Five things, and your current system probably does two of them.
Employees, the people on site who are not on the payroll, drivers waiting at the weighbridge, the two engineers who came through the gate at 06:40 with a visitor pass. One list, one place, current to the minute.
At the muster point, in the open, in under a minute, on something a supervisor can hold. A list that lives on a desktop in the security office is a list that does not exist during an evacuation.
Not "all clear". Person by person, point by point, with a clock on it. The time is what turns a count into evidence, and it is the field most sheets leave off.
Who decides. How long you wait. What triggers a search. Most plants have this rule and it lives in one supervisor's head, which means it leaves the site when he does.
Your last four counts, who was accounted for, at what minute, signed and timestamped. If producing that takes a week of looking through files, you have a filing system and not a record.
Because a muster point roll call system built on badges inherits the assumption that people leave the way they came in. On an ordinary Tuesday that is true. During an evacuation it is the first thing that stops being true.
People go out of the nearest door. They go out of a door that is not a turnstile. They carry someone. They are already outside on a cigarette break and they walk to the gate instead of the muster point. Every one of those is a person your reader never sees, and every one of them shows up in the count as the same thing: a number that does not match.
And the count that does not match is not the real problem. The real problem is that you cannot tell the difference between a miscount and a missing person, and until you can, the only safe assumption is the expensive one.
03 Score your own site
Answer yes or no. One point for each yes. Nobody scores twelve, and the ones that catch people out are 05, 06 and 11.
Do you know, by name, every person inside the gate right now, including the people who are not on your payroll?
YES / NOCan you put that list in a supervisor's hand at the muster point in under sixty seconds, without a laptop?
YES / NOIs there a written rule for what happens when a count does not reconcile, and does it name who decides?
YES / NOIs your time to first full count written down anywhere, as a number, from a real drill?
YES / NOIf a person never reached a reader, does anything in your plant know they are still inside?
YES / NOCould you produce, six months from now, who was accounted for in your last drill and at what minute?
YES / NODoes that record carry a timestamp an inspector can test, rather than only a signature he cannot?
YES / NOIs it written down who signs the count, and what happens if the person who signs is the person missing?
YES / NOAre the people on site who are not on the payroll on the same list as your employees, or on a second sheet?
YES / NOHas a drill of yours ever closed with a discrepancy nobody explained, and been filed as closed?
NO / YESDo you reconcile against the gate pass, and does the gate pass cover the canteen, the toilets and the smoking area?
YES / NOIf the inspector asked today for your last four counts, how long would it take, and is that answer under an hour?
YES / NOThat is not a failure of your emergency plan. It is the one step in the plan that no instrument tells you how to do, so it is the step that has been left as a human process on a clipboard while everything around it was systematised.
MUSTER POINT READINESS CHECK one per site
SITE .................................. DATE ..................
MUSTER POINTS IN USE .......... PEAK ON SITE ..........
OF WHICH NOT ON PAYROLL ..........
Y / N
01 Every person inside the gate known by name,
including those not on the payroll .....
02 That list in a supervisor's hand at the point,
under 60 seconds, no laptop .....
03 Written rule for a count that does not
reconcile, naming who decides .....
04 Time to first full count written down,
from a real drill .....
05 Something knows a person is inside when they
never reached a reader .....
06 Last drill reproducible in 6 months: who,
and at what minute .....
07 Record carries a testable timestamp, not only
a signature .....
08 Who signs the count is written down, and what
happens if he is the one missing .....
09 Non-payroll people on the SAME list as
employees .....
10 No drill has ever closed with an unexplained
discrepancy .....
11 Reconciled against the gate pass, and the gate
pass covers canteen, toilets, smoking area .....
12 Last four counts producible today in under
an hour .....
SCORE ...... / 12
9 OR BELOW the drill is compliant and the headcount is not evidence
10 TO 11 the process holds; the record is where it is thin
12 check 05 again, honestly
Notes ................................................................
......................................................................
No gate, no email box, no second form. Copy it, print it, score your own site on a Tuesday.
Current against · the Manufacture, Storage and Import of Hazardous Chemical Rules, rule 13(4), the drill at a major accident hazard installation · the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, the emergency standards and on-site plan duties. Re-verified October 2026.
04 The market
Six vendors, five categories, one blind spot they all share. None of them is named here and none of them needs to be, because the gap is in the architecture and not in the brand.
| What you will be shown | What it is actually good at | What it cannot tell you at 11:04 |
|---|---|---|
| Badge and turnstile | Attendance, payroll hours, access control at a controlled door | Who left by a door that is not a turnstile |
| Tag and tracking hardware | Locating a tag that is switched on and being worn | Who is not wearing the tag, and who left it in a locker |
| Visitor management | Who signed in at reception and against whose name | Whether that visitor reached a muster point or a car park |
| Facility-operations suite | The paperwork trail after the event | Anything at all during the fourteen minutes |
| A headcount app on a phone | Replacing the clipboard with a screen | Who opens it when the alarm goes, and whether the phone is certified for the area it is carried into |
The app question is worth its own sentence because it is the one most plants try first and it is the cheapest to get wrong. A supervisor who is marshalling two hundred people is not also operating software. And in a zone 2 area the handset itself has to be certified before it goes near the muster point, which quietly removes most of the devices anyone would actually use.
No number on this page, and that is deliberate. What you can have is the shape of the quote, so you can read two of them side by side and know why they differ.
How many assembly points you actually use, not how many are painted on the layout drawing. This is the number that moves a quote most and the one most sites get wrong at the first meeting.
Almost every plant already has a camera looking at its main assembly area. What matters is how many of your points are covered today, because that is the part you are not buying again.
Headcount on its own, or headcount beside the other things the same cameras can evidence. One module is the honest way to start.
On-premise edge, hybrid or cloud. On-premise is the common Indian choice and it is settled at the survey, not quoted in advance.
Anyone who quotes you before answering those four has guessed, and a guess that comes in low at the first meeting is the one that grows later. The survey exists so that nobody is guessing, and it is also the step that tells you how much of the system you already own.
05 What we do about it
Every one of those five is a condition rather than a person. That is accuracy, not diplomacy: all five survive a change of staff, and four of them were created by a system rather than by anybody standing at the muster point.
At 11:00 your cameras are already pointed at the muster point. VijAI counts what they see and puts a time on it, so the sheet in the supervisor's hand has a second record beside it that nobody wrote by hand. When the two disagree you know inside the minute instead of at the debrief.
It runs on the cameras you have. Zero new hardware, which in a category built entirely out of hardware is the whole argument. The survey tells you which of your muster points are already covered, and most sites find the main assembly area is one of them.
Six months later it is the part of the file that answers a question: here is the count, here is the minute it closed, here is the second record that was taken at the same time by something that was not holding a clipboard.
One line so nothing is misread. VijAI evidences that a person was present at a muster point at a stated time. It is not a life-safety system, it does not replace your roll call, and it does not decide whether to send a search party. That decision stays with your incident controller, where it belongs.
Deployment is on-premise edge, hybrid or cloud, settled during the survey rather than quoted in advance.
L0 · THE MODULE
What counting people on existing cameras does across a plant, and the moments other than the drill where it earns its place.
The module →L3 · THE RECORD
The format a plant files after the drill, field by field, with a worked example and the five things that get it returned.
The format →NEXT · ONE PLANT
Which of your assembly points your existing cameras already cover, and what a timed count from one of them looks like.
Talk to us →Sources · the Manufacture, Storage and Import of Hazardous Chemical Rules, rule 13(4), the drill at a major accident hazard installation · the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, on-site emergency plan and emergency standards · the VijAI PulseAI module demand register, harvested 13 September 2026, for the incumbent categories counted above. Named in text and not linked, so nothing on this page sends a reader away from it.
06 How it runs
The first question IT asks is where the video goes. All three answers are here, and detection by default with identification optional applies to every one of them.
| Model | Where the video is processed | Where it fits |
|---|---|---|
| On-premise edge | Entirely inside the plant. Nothing leaves your network. | Licensed areas, sites with a data-residency rule, and plants with no dependable outbound link. |
| HybridRecommended | Detection at the edge, dashboards and reporting hosted. Footage stays on site. Only events leave. | Most plants. Video stays inside the boundary and head office still gets one view across every site. |
| Cloud | Processing and storage hosted. | Single sites, short pilots, and estates already running their VMS this way. |
The model is chosen in the survey, against your network and your data rules. It is not a price tier.
07 Who installs it
Survey, engineering, installation, commissioning, calibration, training and support are all done by VB people. When a camera angle is wrong on a Sunday night, the person who fixes it is the person who chose it.
08 The six we are asked
Reach the assembly point by the route you were told, report to the person holding the list for your area, and stay there until you are released. The single thing that breaks a count is people leaving the muster point before the count closes.
In India the duty follows the hazard and the installation rather than a headcount alone. A major accident hazard installation carries an on-site emergency plan and a tested drill regardless of how few people work there, which is why a small plant can carry a larger duty than a big one.
Detection, alarm, shutdown, evacuation, assembly and accounting, response, and all-clear with debrief. Assembly and accounting is the step most plans describe in one line and most sites cannot evidence afterwards.
The whole set of things that run between detection and all-clear: alarm, shutdown, evacuation routing, accounting for people, and the response team itself. A headcount system is one component of it and the only one that answers whether anybody is still inside.
Muster is a military term for assembling a unit so it can be counted. The name survives because the purpose survives: the point exists so people can be counted, not simply so they can be somewhere safe.
An area where an explosive gas atmosphere is not likely in normal operation and, if it occurs, will persist only briefly. It matters to a headcount because equipment taken into it must be certified for it, which rules out most handheld devices a supervisor would otherwise carry to the muster point.
09 The next step
You will know by the next drill whether your count closes. No new hardware, one module, one plant.
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