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“The programme manager insisted that I accompany him to his place. On the way, he started touching me inappropriately... He asked me to sleep with him. Despite a clear ‘no’, he continued to force himself on me.”
“ I took up the complaint with my superior, who then took it to the HR manage... But my relationship with my boss was already strained — he said it was all my fault. I ended up leaving my fellowship incomplete. My complaint was not taken up. The programme manager’s career, however, soared high.”
Ridhima Chopra, 25, is among the growing number of Indian women encouraged to complain about harassment at work by the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, promulgated in the wake of the 2012 Delhi gang rape.
An IndiaSpend analysis of available data and conversations with working women showed there was an increase in reported cases of harassment from 2015 onward, the year for which latest data are available
In the year before, between 2013 and 2014, the National Commission for Women reported a 35% increase in complaints from 249 to 336, according to this December 2014 reply filed in the Lok Sabha .
Despite the rise in numbers, women, like Chopra, are finding that their complaints are not redressed effectively by employers. Employers are either unaware of the law’s provisions or have implemented them partially and even those that do set up internal panels have poorly trained members.
These problems apply not just to private and public sector establishments but also to relatively younger information technology (IT) companies.
An internal complaints committee (ICC) is mandatory in every private or public organisation that has 10 or more employees, according to the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013.
Kunjila Mascillamani, a freelance writer, had filed a complaint against sexual harassment while she was a student at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI) in Kolkata.
Mascillamani had filed two cases – one of harassment and another of rape. The verdict on harassment was passed in July 2016 and the professors who harassed her were asked to take retirement. The rape case is still pending in court.
SRFTI chairperson Partha Ghose in an interview said that the complaints of sexual harassment were a “new and shocking” experience for him. He described it as a “disciplinary problem” on which the institution had acted as required by the law.
All ministries and departments in the government of India have constituted ICCs, the ministry of women and child development told the Lok Sabha in this December 2016 reply. The ministry of corporate affairs – along with industry bodies ASSOCHAM, FICCI, Confederation of Indian Industry, Chamber of Commerce & Industry, and National Association of Software and Services Companies – was requested to ensure its effective execution in the private sector.
There is a high rate of non-compliance in the private sector, as is evident in the 2015 study, ‘Reining in Sexual harassment at Workplace’, by Ernst and Young.
Two in five IT companies were oblivious to the need to set up ICCs and 50% of advertising and media companies had not conducted training for ICC members, the study found.
Three years ago, Meera Kaushik (not her real name) had started working in a Pune-based media and advertising company as a copywriter. She had an uneasy time during her job interview when her future employer insisted that she smile.
Kaushik finally did leave her job.
Anagha Sarpotdar, a researcher who works on sexual harassment at workplaces and an external member appointed to monitor such trials by Mumbai city, was of the view that employers are wrong to discourage reporting in order to protect their image.
“Low or no reporting speaks volumes about the gender sensitivity of a particular organisation,” she said.
Chopra pointed out that though her contract promised “strict action” against sexual harassment, there was little awareness about the issue at her former workplace. And no effort was made to create awareness either.
“Under the law, there are guidelines to display information at a conspicuous place in the workplace, list the penal consequences of sexual harassment. There is also an order directing the ICC to create awareness regarding sexual harassment in all government departments and ministries. But these don’t exist,” said Shikha Chhibber, a Delhi-based lawyer.
During the hearings on her case, the freelance writer Mascillamani said she was blamed for the incident. “All the faculty members and the administration had turned against me and I was ‘slut-shamed’ on social media. It was at this juncture that I approached an NGO to appoint an external member to oversee the procedure and ensure a fair trial,” she said.
As Sarpotdar pointed out, for many organisations, training sessions on workplace harassment is only a box to be ticked. “They lack the perspective on gender equality to put the law into action,” she said.
(Manisha Chachra is an MPhil student at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has previously worked at Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative.)
(This article has been published in collaboration with IndiaSpend.)
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Published: 04 Mar 2017,10:44 PM IST