Building and Leading the Vaayu Fest Security Department
Recruited, trained, and structured a sixty-person security team over eight months, selecting five sub-leads based on demonstrated performance
Swagnik Paul
Investment Banking at JM Financial Ltd
From their time as
Head of Security
Vaayu Fest • 2024 - 2025
Overview
Swagnik took on the Head of Security role at Vaayu Fest roughly eight to ten months before the event, inheriting a department of sixty first-year students with no prior event experience. The mandate was to prepare them to manage security and operations for a three-day festival with more than twenty thousand attendees at JVPT Grounds in Mumbai.
The Story
Swagnik took on the Head of Security role at Vaayu Fest roughly eight to ten months before the event, inheriting a department of sixty first-year students with no prior event experience. The mandate was to prepare them to manage security and operations for a three-day festival with more than twenty thousand attendees at JVPT Grounds in Mumbai.
He structured the preparation cycle from the start. He ran regular meetings to train members on crowd management, emergency protocols, and their specific roles during the event. Because he could not be present in college at all times, given his parallel responsibility for legal clearances, he needed a layer of leadership within the team that could operate without him.
Over the eight-to-ten month cycle, he observed each member's performance across real tasks: sponsor fundraising calls, security drills, and day-to-day reliability. He selected five members based on what they actually did, not on seniority or self-nomination. Those five became sub-leads, each responsible for a group within the department, and they ran the team when Swagnik was occupied with institutional stakeholders.
The structure held under live conditions. The department executed across all three days of the festival, including during the crowd emergency at the entry gate, without the team structure breaking down.