Who India’s workplace harassment law leaves behind

In October 2017, as the first wave of the global MeToo movement broke, Indian women began sharing accounts of workplace harassment that had gone unaddressed for years. The hashtag surfaced stories from film sets, newsrooms, law firms, and government offices. For a few weeks, the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, the POSH Act, passed in 2013 felt newly relevant.

But for the majority of India’s working women, the moment passed without consequence. Not because their experiences were less real, but because the law was never designed to reach them. The domestic worker, the gig delivery rider, the agricultural labourer, the political party functionary, each of them exists in a gap where the POSH Act’s coverage ends.

Estimates place over 80 per cent of India’s female workforce in the informal or unorganised sector. The law’s protections, in their most meaningful form, apply to the remaining fraction: salaried women employed by organisations with ten or more workers.

The Local Committee

When the Act was drafted, the Parliament did consider the informal sector. Section 6 mandates the constitution of a Local Committee (LC) in every district, specifically to receive complaints from workers in smaller establishments and unorganised workplaces.

In practice, LCs have been one of the Act’s quietest failures. Many district LCs had never been constituted while others exist only nominally. More than that, informal workers had little awareness they existed at all. Imagine a domestic worker who comes to your home – do you think she would be aware of the Act or the LC? Unlike Internal Committees, which are embedded within organisations, LCs require a complainant to know where to go, how to file, and that she has the right to do so. For a daily-wage worker or a woman labourer without a written contract, these are big barriers.

When the Supreme Court issued nationwide compliance directions in 2023 in Aureliano Fernandes v. State of Goa (2024) 1 SCC 632, the directions were largely aimed at organised workplaces. Moreover, in the said Judgment, the Supreme Court itself noted that out of 30 national sports federations in the country, 16 had not constituted an ICC.

Domestic workers: named, then abandoned

The POSH Act explicitly acknowledges domestic workers as a category requiring protection. Section 2(o), which defines “workplace,” includes a “dwelling place or a house” meaning a household employer can, in principle, be the subject of a complaint.

This protection is largely symbolic. To file a complaint, a domestic worker must establish the existence of an employment relationship. Most domestic workers have no contract, no appointment letter, no payslip. Their work is often informal, cash-based, and conducted across multiple households. An employer who denies the relationship or simply delays faces little immediate consequence.

There is also the matter of dependence. Domestic workers frequently rely on their employers not only for income but for housing, references, and, in some cases, legal status. The complaint mechanism under the POSH Act asks a woman in this position to take formal action against the person on whom her livelihood depends, through a local government body she may never have heard of, in a process that can take months. The law offers her a right without offering her a realistic means of exercising it.

Gig workers: a modern exclusion

The POSH Act was passed in 2013. India’s gig economy – Ola, Uber, Zomato, Swiggy, Urban Company and the dozens of platforms that have followed was in its infancy. The law’s framers cannot be faulted for failing to anticipate it. But the consequence, a decade later, is that millions of workers exist in a legal grey zone with respect to workplace harassment.

Platform companies classify their workers as “partners” or “independent contractors,” not employees. Without an employer-employee relationship, a platform worker has no Internal Committee to approach, and the LC infrastructure in most districts is inadequate to handle the scale.

A food delivery worker who experiences harassment from a customer has no clear redressal path. A home services worker who is assaulted in a client’s house faces even greater structural barriers: her “workplace” is someone else’s home, her “employer” is a platform, and her harasser is neither.

Men, transgender persons, and the gender architecture of the Act

The POSH Act protects women. Only women may file complaints under it. The respondent, the person against whom a complaint is made, may be of any gender, but the complainant may not. Men who experience workplace sexual harassment have no equivalent statutory remedy. Transgender persons face a more complex situation: those who hold legal identity documentation recognising them as women may file complaints, but those who do not are excluded.

The Supreme Court addressed this directly in Binu Tamta v. High Court of Delhi (Judgment Dated 07.11.2023 in MA No. 2308/2023 in W.P.(C) No. 162/2013), declining to extend the Act’s protections to LGBTQ+ individuals. The court held that expanding the law’s scope was a legislative function, not a judicial one. Some organisations have responded by adopting internal gender-neutral policies, but these operate outside the statutory framework and offer none of its procedural guarantees.

Every ICC that I am a part of, I strongly advise organisations to have a gender neutral policy because the argument for gender neutrality rests on a recognition that the power dynamics underlying workplace harassment may not always be gendered in the way the Act assumes. A male employee harassed by a senior colleague, or a non-binary worker targeted because of their gender presentation, has no statutory protection. The law addresses a real and serious harm but draws its boundaries in ways that leave others with equivalent harms outside them.

Political parties and the limits of “workplace”

In September 2025, the Supreme Court upheld a Kerala High Court ruling that political parties are not “workplaces” under the POSH Act. Party members are not employees, there is no payment of wages, and therefore the employer-employee relationship required to trigger the Act does not exist.

Political parties are significant sites of power, sites in which women routinely work, campaign, canvass, organise, and hold office. The Vishaka Guidelines of 1997, which the POSH Act was enacted to implement, were grounded in a broad conception of workplace safety rooted in constitutional rights to dignity and equality, not merely in the law of employment contracts.

The pattern beneath the gaps

Taken together, it appears that the POSH Act protects workers who are already relatively protected. Those with formal employment, written contracts, stable incomes, and institutional affiliations have the most reliable access to its mechanisms. Those without them: the domestic worker, the platform rider, the informal agricultural labourer are left to the Local Committee, an institution that in many parts of the country exists only on paper.

In the years since the passage of the Act, awareness has grown, Internal Committees have been constituted, and courts have developed a substantial body of jurisprudence interpreting its provisions.

But the gap between what the law promises and who it actually reaches, requires, at minimum, a serious investment in Local Committee infrastructure, legal recognition of gig workers as employees for the purposes of the Act, and a willingness to revisit the gender architecture of the legislation.

*Anuja Pethia, Partner, Swarnim Legal