13 years after Parliament passed the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, an uncomfortable question refuses to go away. Why do so many Indian offices, private and public, still treat this law as a formality rather than an obligation? This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a documented, recurring, and worsening pattern that deserves to be named plainly: India has a POSH compliance crisis, and it is time to stop pretending otherwise.

A Law Born of Outrage, Treated With Indifference

The POSH Act did not emerge from a policy seminar. It emerged from the brutalisation of Bhanwari Devi, a social worker in Rajasthan who was gang-raped in 1992 for trying to stop a child marriage, and from the Supreme Court’s 1997 Vishaka judgment that followed her case. The Court, in the absence of any statutory framework, was compelled to legislate through guidelines because the state itself had failed working women. Sixteen years later, those guidelines became law. Yet the underlying problem the law was built to solve, employer indifference to women’s safety, has not disappeared. It has simply changed its costume, from open denial to bureaucratic box-ticking.

Every organisation with ten or more employees is legally required to constitute an Internal Complaints Committee, adopt a written POSH policy, conduct annual training, and file an annual return with the District Officer by January 31. Non-compliance attracts a fine of up to fifty thousand rupees for a first offence, with repeat violations doubling the penalty and, in principle, risking cancellation of a business licence. On paper, this is a reasonably robust framework. In practice, consultants and compliance auditors who review Indian workplaces routinely report that a significant share of employers, particularly startups, MSMEs, and fast-growing firms, either never formed a committee or constituted one incorrectly.

Consider a case that recently surfaced from a mid-size Bengaluru IT firm. It had an Internal Complaints Committee, at least on paper. Its Presiding Officer had left the company eight months earlier and nobody bothered to reconstitute the committee. When a complaint finally arrived in January 2026, the entire inquiry collapsed on procedural grounds, and the employer received a show-cause notice from the District Officer. This is not a freak accident. It is what happens when a legal mandate is treated as HR paperwork rather than institutional infrastructure.

Even at the apex of Indian public life, the gaps are visible. In 2026, a public interest litigation sought to bring political parties, some of the most powerful workplaces in the country, under the POSH Act’s ambit, on the grounds that many parties have never constituted an Internal Complaints Committee at all. The petition argued that the exclusion of political parties leaves women in politics vulnerable and that inconsistent implementation of committees perpetuates a culture that fails to prioritise women’s safety. The Supreme Court declined to extend the Act to political parties, with the bench observing that treating party membership as employment could, in its words, become a tool for blackmail. Whatever one makes of that specific ruling, the fact that such a petition was necessary in 2026, thirteen years into the law’s life, tells its own story.

The Data Does Not Flatter India

India likes to describe itself as an emerging economic superpower, and by GDP trajectory that description is not wrong. But GDP growth and institutional maturity are not the same thing, and workplace safety compliance is one of the clearest places where the gap shows. Independent compliance reviews and government surveys have consistently found that a meaningful proportion of Indian employers, across sectors, either have no functioning Internal Complaints Committee or one that exists only in name, without proper composition, without the mandatory external member, without annual training, and without an annual return filed. Judicial observations across multiple cases have flagged the same three recurring failures: missing external members, lapsed committee terms that are never renewed, and a near-total absence of employee awareness because training, when it happens at all, is a single slide in an onboarding deck.

Compare this with peer developing economies. Kenya’s Employment Act and the work of its National Gender and Equality Commission require sexual harassment policies in workplaces above a certain size, with enforcement increasingly tied to labour inspections. Bangladesh’s High Court, drawing directly on India’s own Vishaka precedent, issued binding directives in 2009 mandating complaint committees in every workplace, and its garment sector, under sustained pressure from international buyers and the Accord on Fire and Building Safety framework, has developed harassment grievance mechanisms that are audited as part of export compliance. South Africa’s Employment Equity Act and its Code of Good Practice on the Handling of Sexual Harassment Cases are backed by the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, a specialised labour tribunal that gives complainants a genuine external escalation route, something India’s district-level Local Complaints Committees only weakly approximate, especially outside metropolitan areas.

At the global standard-setting level, the gap is starker still. The International Labour Organization’s Convention 190, adopted in 2019, is the first international treaty to recognise violence and harassment in the world of work as a human rights issue, covering not just employees but interns, job applicants, and even bystanders, and it explicitly calls for gender-responsive approaches that account for men and non-binary workers as well. India has not ratified Convention 190. The European Union’s framework under its 2006 Equal Treatment Directive requires member states to designate an independent body for the promotion of equal treatment, giving complainants access to a body outside their own employer’s control, something India’s law offers only partially and unevenly. The United States, through Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and decades of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforcement, has developed a mature body of case law on hostile work environment liability that shapes corporate risk calculus in a way India’s comparatively young jurisprudence has not yet achieved. The point is not that these systems are perfect. It is that they treat enforcement as continuous, not episodic, and India’s own compliance ecosystem, twenty-six years after Vishaka, is still catching up to standards other developing nations reached faster.

Reading the Failure Through Social Theory

It is worth asking why a law with clear statutory teeth produces such patchy compliance, and social science offers more than one useful lens.

Robert Merton’s structural functionalism would frame the Internal Complaints Committee as a manifest institution meant to serve a latent organisational function, symbolic legitimacy, rather than its stated function, actual redress. Many employers do not resist the POSH Act because they reject its values. They comply just enough to signal legitimacy to regulators, clients, and investors, while quietly under-resourcing the mechanism itself. This is what sociologists call decoupling, the gap between formal structure and actual practice, and it explains precisely why so many committees exist on an organisation chart but collapse the moment a real complaint tests them.

Michel Foucault’s account of power as productive rather than purely repressive is equally instructive. Workplace hierarchies generate their own micro-disciplines of silence: a junior employee’s calculation of career risk, a manager’s informal authority to reassign or exclude, an HR department’s institutional loyalty to the employer rather than the complainant. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence captures the same dynamic from another angle: harassment and its concealment are often naturalised as “how this industry works,” internalised by victims and bystanders alike as an unfortunate but unchangeable feature of professional life, until the internalisation itself becomes part of the problem.

Finally, a rational choice and principal-agent lens explain employer behaviour rather than victim behaviour. When the expected cost of non-compliance, a modest fine, rarely enforced, is lower than the expected cost of a functioning grievance mechanism, reputational exposure, internal disruption, potential liability, some employers will rationally under-invest in compliance. This is not a claim about individual malice. It is a claim about incentive structures, and it is precisely why the fifty-thousand-rupee penalty under Section 26, unchanged since 2013 and trivial for any mid-size or large employer, functions less as a deterrent than as a rounding error.

Defending Women’s Rights, Without Apology

None of the above should be softened. Underreporting remains the dominant reality of workplace harassment in India. Surveys conducted by industry bodies and legal researchers over the past decade have repeatedly found that a majority of women who experience harassment at work do not file a formal complaint, citing fear of retaliation, career damage, social stigma, and, crucially, a well-founded belief that the committee meant to protect them either does not function or will not be taken seriously by management. This is not paranoia. It is a rational response to institutions that have, in case after case, proven themselves hollow. A committee without a properly reconstituted Presiding Officer, without an external member, without confidentiality protocols that are enforced, is not a safety net. It is theatre, and women who decline to test a stage set know exactly what they are doing.

Defending Men’s Rights, Without Contradiction

A serious argument for stronger POSH enforcement must also take seriously the anxieties raised, often dismissively, under the banner of men’s rights. The Supreme Court’s own observation that expanding certain frameworks could become a tool for blackmail is not an outlier concern. Natural justice, the presumption of innocence during inquiry, the right to a fair hearing, and protection against malicious complaints are not obstacles to women’s safety, they are preconditions for the law’s legitimacy. Section 14 of the Act already penalises complaints proven to be false or malicious, but many organisations apply this provision inconsistently or not at all, leaving accused employees in a limbo of suspended careers and social judgment even when an inquiry ultimately clears them. A credible POSH regime protects the genuinely aggrieved and shields the wrongly accused with equal seriousness. Treating these as competing rather than complementary goals is precisely the kind of false binary that weakens public trust in the entire framework, on both sides.

Why This Cannot Wait Any Longer?

India’s female labour force participation rate, despite recent modest gains, remains among the lowest of major economies, and workplace safety is not a peripheral factor in that statistic, it is a structural one. A country that wants to be taken seriously as a global manufacturing and services hub, that wants multinational clients to trust its outsourced back offices, that wants its own claims of demographic dividend to translate into actual productivity, cannot afford institutions that exist mainly on letterhead. Global capital increasingly prices in ESG and labour governance risk, and a workplace with a fictional grievance mechanism is a governance liability waiting to be discovered by an auditor, a journalist, or a court.

The choice in front of Indian employers, public and private, is not between compliance and non-compliance as competing costs. It is between building institutions that work and continuing to gamble on the assumption that nobody will ever test the committee that exists only in a PDF. That gamble has already failed enough times, in enough sectors, at enough scale, that it can no longer be called bad luck. It is a policy choice, and it is time India’s workplaces made a different one.

Views of the author are personal and do not necessarily represent the website’s views.

Dr. Jaimine Vaishnav is a faculty of geopolitics and world economy and other liberal arts subjects, a researcher with publications in SCI and ABDC journals, and an author of 6 books specializing in informal economies, mass media, and street entrepreneurship. With over a decade of experience as an academic and options trader, he is keen on bridging the grassroots business practices with global economic thought. His work emphasizes resilience, innovation, and human action in everyday human life. He can be contacted on jaiminism@hotmail.co.in for further communication.

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