It’s time to revisit the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) or POSH Act— the legislation is falling short in keeping harassment at the workplace in check.
“The POSH Act is a big wholesome lie told to us,” a civil judge in Uttar Pradesh’s Banda wrote in a letter to Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud. She says she has been sexually harassed to “the very limit”, and cautioned women from using this redressal mechanism, which is “torturous”.
“No one listens, not even the Supreme Court,” she wrote.
Now, another retired judge in Rajasthan has written to the CJI, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and President Droupadi Murmu, stating that she was harassed on the job. No FIR was filed and she was allegedly fired from service with “stigmatic remarks”, which will not allow her to “live peacefully and with dignity in any part of the world”.
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The CJI has asked for an inquiry in the matter of the Allahabad civil judge, who rightly pointed out the ineffectiveness of the POSH Act. Her story deserved more than just a day’s worth of hue and cry on social media.
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State of sports bodies
The MeToo movement was more effective in raising awareness and changing male-female workplace dynamics than the law. In fact, the Mumbai film industry woke up to the POSH Act and implemented it in its own way only after the MeToo storm in 2018. I reported earlier how POSH committees, created by various associations of directors, producers, artists, crew members and workers, have not received a single complaint in the last five years.
The Act, designed to safeguard women’s safety in the workplace, desperately needs an overhaul. Women are still struggling to find a safe working environment, and more importantly a just mechanism to raise complaints. The fact that India’s celebrated wrestlers had to sit at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar for their sexual harassment complaints against Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh to be heard is telling. The POSH committee at WFI openly flouted norms as it had only one female member and a male chairman.
The state of affairs in other sports bodies is equally deplorable. A state-appointed coach and sprinter in Haryana pounded on the doors of officials, bureaucrats and ministers, but nobody answered to her complaints against state’s sports minister Sandeep Singh.
The Modi government called for a special session in Parliament this year for a Bill on women’s reservation. If the government is serious about women empowerment, it needs to reassess the POSH Act to make it more effective and transparent.
What the law needs
The prevention of sexual harassment Act came from the Vishakha Guidelines (1997), which were formulated after the Bhanwari Devi gang rape case.
It took the legislature 16 years to pass the law. And in the last 10 years since its implementation, the state of affairs in various sectors show that POSH is not only a lie, it is treated as a joke by organisations.
One of the primary mandates of the Act is to create awareness about the law among women. A recent survey showed that only 8 per cent of Indian women know about it. Even the government app, SHe-Box, designed to encourage women to file complaints about sexual harassment, has received barely over a thousand complaints since 2017 until 2022. In 2021, former Minister of Women and Child Development Smriti Irani told Parliament that out of 36 new complaints the government had received on SHe-Box, only four were related to harassment at the workplace.
Does this mean India has magically been cured of the disease of sexual harassment? No. It means people in this country lack not only the knowledge, but also the agency to speak up against the wrong done to them.
In many cases of workplace harassment, committees are formed, typically comprising senior employees. It becomes a challenging task to keep these committee hearings non-political and unbiased. And external members or expert-training does little in ensuring such committees work in a non-partisan and professional manner. And the worst bit? The proceedings cannot be reported or even publicly discussed.
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No media scrutiny
Since reports of POSH committees cannot be published in the media, there is no way to hold them accountable. For my report on sexual harassment in Mumbai’s film industry, I had received a cease and desist notice from one of the production companies.
Point 16 of the POSH Act states that except matters that fall under the Right to Information (RTI) Act 2005, identity and addresses of aggrieved women, respondents, and employers cannot be made public. The proceedings of internal or local committees, conciliation or recommendations cannot be published, communicated or otherwise made public or told to the press or media.
Even though such strong wordings in the law exist to ensure confidentiality of the complainant, it is common in workplaces for POSH complaints to spread like wildfire. Even if gossip doesn’t circulate the name, the head of the company usually learns who the complainant is. So, this illusion of privacy serves no purpose.
How does one scrutinise the functioning of an almost quasi-judicial body when everything happens behind closed doors. If the complainant finds lapses in the working of the committee, where should she report it? Trapping internal committee proceedings in sealed files is not helping the aggrieved.
Evolving workplaces need better mechanisms than POSH to ensure safety of women employees. Indian women’s labour force participation is not just lower than the global average but is also declining. Employment isn’t just a source of income and a path to independence for women; it also ensures their safety and security in society. Dependence on men can make women vulnerable to violence, financial independence keeps them standing on their feet and frees them from the trap of abusive or unsatisfactory relationships.
The simple act of travelling for work in itself becomes a sort of harassment for women who rely on public transport. At least they can feel safe in the workplace. Easy answers of creating women-bogeys do not work. Lawmakers should listen to the judges and give POSH the long-pending overhaul it deserves.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)