There is a particular silence that settles in offices across India when someone decides not to report what happened.
It is not the silence of a decision freely made. It is the silence of a calculation. A calculation that weighs the risk of speaking against the risk of staying quiet, and concludes, in most cases, that staying quiet is safer.
Adv. Amarjit Singh, Legal Author and author of Legal and Constitutional Rights of Women in India, has studied this silence carefully. His chapter on workplace sexual harassment addresses not only what the law requires but why so many women who know something about the POSH Act still do not file complaints.
The answer is not ignorance alone. It is the specific combination of what women know and what they do not know, and which part of that combination their employers have made sure to leave in shadow.
What most employers prefer their employees not to know:
The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 applies to every organization with ten or more employees. Not some organizations. Every organization.
The law requires every such organization to constitute an Internal Complaints Committee. This is not optional. The ICC must include at least one external member from an NGO or legal background. It cannot consist only of internal employees.
The employer is required to organize awareness programs about the Act. This is a legal obligation, not a policy choice.
The complaint process gives the complainant specific protections. Proceedings must be completed within sixty days. Both parties must have the opportunity to present their case. The ICC submits its report within ten days of completing inquiry.
The employer cannot retaliate against a complainant. Retaliation is itself a violation with consequences for the organization.
If the employer fails to constitute an ICC or fails to comply with the Act, the organization faces penalty. This penalty reaches the senior management level, not only the HR department.
What the documented failures reveal:
Adv. Amarjit Singh documents cases where the ICC failed women who approached it. ICCs constituted with incorrect composition. Inquiries that exceeded the mandated timeline. Investigations that were compromised by the respondent’s access to information that should have been protected. Complainants who were transferred to different departments or locations while the respondent remained in place.
None of these failures change what the law requires. They change what a woman needs to know about enforcing what the law requires when the organization does not comply voluntarily.
The book maps specifically what external resources are available when internal mechanisms fail, including the Local Complaints Committee that handles cases where the organization has fewer than ten employees or where the respondent is the employer himself.
Why women still do not complain and what the law has to say about that reality:
Fear of retaliation is the most consistently documented reason. The law prohibits retaliation. The law does not prevent it from occurring. Understanding the distinction matters, because it changes how a complainant needs to document her situation from the beginning of the process rather than only after retaliation has occurred.
Economic dependence shapes decisions that the law cannot reach directly. A woman who depends on continued employment for basic survival makes calculations that go beyond what any statute can resolve. Adv. Amarjit Singh acknowledges this explicitly, because legal knowledge that ignores economic reality is incomplete knowledge.
Legal and Constitutional Rights of Women in India by Adv. Amarjit Singh is available on Amazon, Flipkart, Kindle, and Google Books. Buy now and know exactly what your employer is legally required to provide and what your options are when they choose not to.
Grab your copy now: https://amzn.in/d/04U760fo
