Making POSH work: Govt institutions must lead in ensuring workplace safety

The Supreme Court’s latest orders to all government departments and public-sector undertakings to implement sexual-harassment laws speak volumes for the institutional and political disinterest in making the workplace safe for women. It is especially reprehensible that these orders come more than 10 years after Parliament passed the landmark Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition, Redressal) Act, or POSH Act, in 2013. They follow the apex court’s statement in May last year, noting serious lapses in enforcing the Act in a case involving an appeal by a Goa University professor against sexual harassment charges by women students. At that time, the Supreme Court had issued detailed directions, requiring governments at the Centre, states, and Union Territories to verify whether all departments under them had constituted local complaint committees (LCCs) for districts or internal complaints committees (ICCs), whether information about them was adequately disseminated, and whether awareness programmes were regularly held. In its latest order, the court has set a deadline of January 2025 for constituting LCCs or ICCs, directed creating SheBox portals for women to register their complaints, and said all compliances must be in place by March 2025. Such repeated pronouncements from the apex court underline the glacial pace at which women’s rights are protected in practice.

 

This should come as no surprise. Last year, an investigation following protests by women wrestlers against alleged sexual harassment by the federation head revealed that most accredited sports bodies in India lacked ICCs. Earlier this year, the ambiguous response by the West Bengal government to the rape and murder of a woman trainee doctor at the R G Kar Medical College and Hospital exposed the collective indifference to women’s security at the workplace. These incidents are doubly regrettable because government institutions should, ideally, have taken the lead in implementing the POSH Act. Doing so would have acted as a beacon to the private sector, which has proven notably lax on this head. This is in spite of the fact that implementing the Act is compulsory for all private companies. In 2018, the Securities and Exchange Board of India made it mandatory for all listed companies to disclose data on cases of sexual harassment in their annual reports. In May this year, a study by Ashoka University’s Centre for Economic Data and Analysis showed that there had, indeed, been an increase in the number of cases of sexual harassment reported by companies in their annual reports. But the companies reporting cases constitute a fraction of the number of listed ones. Even more remarkably, several companies have been reporting zero cases year after year.

 

The broad picture that is emerging is that the majority of Indian corporations — government-owned or private, and listed or unlisted — follow the POSH Act mostly in the breach. For a large number of those that claim to comply, the exercise is proforma in nature, either because these organisations do not employ many women or lack the culture to encourage women to complain. Indeed, the managerial and organisational ostracism of complainants alone acts as a deterrent. When applied to the public sphere, such as district-level public institutions, the chauvinism of Indian society considerably raises the odds against women complainants. The Supreme Court’s well-intentioned directives could mark but a small step towards reordering the balance.