The question that I have posed here is one that has been bothering me for quite some time. Though I belong to a humanities discipline, I have always been fascinated by laws and their impacts. The deep interest in bringing laws into the everyday life of students in my department inspired me to offer elective papers on women specific laws in India. My classroom discussions with students on the possibilities and limitations of different laws for making qualitative changes in the lives of women have caused me to think critically about the text of a few laws. It was during one of those interactions that my focus turned to the constitution of the Internal Complaints Committee under the Sexual Harassment at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013. The Internal Complaints Committees have been made mandatory at workplaces to ensure a just and impartial handling of the complaints of harassments raised by women employees against any one of their male co-workers. In spite of the strength that the law supposedly gives to women to raise their voice against gendered forms of harassments, the functioning of these committees can really be affected for a variety of reasons.
First and foremost, in spite of the law specifying in Chapter IV that workshops have to be organised at regular intervals to sensitise the employees about the provisions of the Act, there doesn’t seem to be any legal auditing of the conduct of such programmes at a fixed frequency, thereby affecting the legal literacy of the employees. Only a legally literate public can effectively use a law for empowerment as well as prevent all possible forms of misuse of the law. The question of training about the Act and the functioning of the ICC gains added significance when we think of the members of the ICC. It is not necessary that the Chairpersons or members of the ICC have a background in law. With legal literacy yet to catch up in our ecosystem, there would be situations where the members of ICC are ignorant of their duties and mode of operation. This will seriously hamper the delivery of justice in such cases.
Second, the Internal Complaints Committees are recommendatory in its legal status. The ICC can recommend suitable action against the guilty to the employer but the committee’s power ends there. The onus is on the employer to take action. This is yet another moment when the law could get reduced to a process without any concrete result. The employers can choose to accept or reject the ICC report based on a number of factors including their prejudices. According to the law, any person, which would include the complainant and respondent, aggrieved by the recommendations or the implementation of the recommendations could approach the court or the tribunal as the case may be. When many women who have been victims of harassment find it too difficult to file a complaint against the accused owing to social stigma, approaching any court of law may be beyond them.
The last but the most serious obstacle in ensuring the effectiveness of the Act could be the description of the constitution of the ICC. In Chapter II, Section 2 (c) of the Act, it is stated that it is mandatory to have “one member from amongst non-governmental organisations or associations committed to the cause of women or a person familiar with the issues relating to sexual harassment.” The question that arises here is whether it is possible to read this clause as a permission to include any of the women employees of the same office as the member under Section 2 (c), provided the said employee is experienced in handling issues related to sexual harassment? I would say that this would be a serious flaw in the constitution of the committee, since the presence of the external member is highly critical to ensure some form of objectivity in the inquiry held on a complaint in which the employees of the same organisation are involved. Further in the Act, under Chapter II, Section (4), it is stated that “The Member appointed from amongst the non-governmental organisations or associations shall be paid such fees or allowances for holding the proceedings of the Internal Committee, by the employer, as may be prescribed.” If we read Section 2 (c) and Section (4) together, it is quite clear that one member has to be from outside the workplace and is eligible for a fee or allowance. Even an external member can have quite a tough time in any office if a section of the employees have turned hostile against the ICC.
But if Section (4) is not considered and if an attempt is made to confine the constitution of the ICC to Section 2 (a) to (c), there seems to be enough room for confusion and there could be instances of all the members of ICC being from within the same office.
The mere presence of a law wouldn’t ‘naturally’ ensure justice. A paradigm shift in the everyday life of women can happen only when the laws are effectively implemented. ICC happens to be one such body which can make remarkable changes to the lives of women at the workplace. For that to happen, there should be compulsory annual auditing of the constitution and working of ICC in all workplaces together with mandatory training sessions for the ICC members and the conduct of regular workshops for all employees.
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