Meera thought she had POSH covered.

She is the HR head at a 140-person software services firm in Pune. Three years ago, when she joined, she found a POSH policy already sitting in the employee handbook. There was an Internal Committee. There were names on a list. A poster hung near the lift on the third floor. Every new joiner clicked through a slide deck during induction. On paper, the company was compliant, and Meera moved on to the hundred other things an HR head juggles in a week.

Then a complaint came in.

A woman on the delivery team filed a written complaint against the team lead. Meera pulled out the committee list to begin the inquiry, and the floor gave way under her. The Presiding Officer named on the list had left the company eighteen months ago. There was no external member at all; no one had ever filled the seat. Two of the named internal members had no idea they were on a committee. There was no annual report on file for the last two years. Someone had copied the handbook policy from a template a consultant sold them in 2019, and it named a city the company no longer operated in.

The committee that was supposed to protect both the complainant and the company did not legally exist. Sitting in her cabin that evening, Meera realised the real danger. If anyone challenged this inquiry in court, a judge could strike down the entire process on a technicality. Not because of what happened, but because of what the company had failed to set up.

This is the POSH reality in a large number of Indian companies. Not open defiance. Not bad intent. Just a committee that exists on paper. A policy nobody has read since it was pasted in. An HR team that believed they were covered, right up to the day they needed the structure to hold weight. And it did not.

Perhaps you are an HR head in India, or a foreign team setting up an India operation. This guide is the conversation I wish someone had had with Meera, three years before that complaint arrived.

POSH compliance in India means four live things: a valid Internal Committee, a current policy, annual filings, and trained members ready to act the day a complaint arrives. It is not a policy sitting unread in a handbook. A committee that has lapsed, or exists only on paper, is non-compliant. Since 2025, the Supreme Court and the Companies Rules have made the cost of that gap far higher.

POSH compliance in India is an employer’s ongoing legal duty under the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, to prevent workplace sexual harassment and run a working redressal structure.

Key takeaways

• Every employer with 10 or more employees must constitute an Internal Committee at each office or branch, not one committee for the whole company.
• The committee needs a senior woman as Presiding Officer, at least two internal members, one external member, and at least half women.
• Inquiry within 90 days, report within 10 days, employer action within 60 days, with strict confidentiality throughout.
• In 2025, the Supreme Court ordered nationwide verification of committees, and companies must now disclose complaint numbers in the Board’s Report.
• A lapsed or paper-only committee is non-compliant; penalties run from fines to cancellation of business licences.

First, What POSH Is (And Why It Is Not Optional)

The full name is a mouthful: the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013. Everyone calls it the POSH Act. It grew out of the Supreme Court’s Vishaka judgment of 1997, which laid down guidelines for workplace safety that functioned as law until Parliament finally passed the Act in 2013.

Here is the part that trips up most people. POSH is not a one-time policy you sign at incorporation and forget. It is year-round, audit-ready compliance, in the same category as PF, ESI, and your tax filings. A policy in a handbook is not compliance. A committee that has lapsed is not in compliance. Compliance is a living structure that has to be ready to function on the day a complaint lands, because that is the only day it truly matters.

Who POSH covers

And the coverage is wider than most HR heads assume. The Act protects every woman who works in your workplace, regardless of her employment status. That includes full-time and part-time employees, those on probation, interns and apprentices, contract workers, daily-wage workers, and women working from home in connection with your workplace. It even extends to women who visit your premises, such as clients, customers, and vendors. The threshold that triggers your obligations is based on headcount, not on how many women you employ. A 25-person manufacturing unit with one woman in the accounts department carries the same core obligations as a 2,000-person company.

The gender limitation worth naming

One honest caveat worth stating plainly, because your readers will know it and respect you for saying it: the POSH Act, as drafted, protects women. It does not, in its current form, cover complaints by men, transgender, or non-binary employees. Many good Indian companies now run a separate, gender-neutral anti-harassment policy alongside their statutory POSH committee to close that gap. That is a choice you make as an employer, not a legal substitute for the POSH structure the law requires.

The Supreme Court Just Raised the Stakes

If you have treated POSH as a low-priority filing, the ground shifted under you in 2025, and most HR teams have not caught up.

In Aureliano Fernandes v. State of Goa, on 12 August 2025, the Supreme Court issued strong directions to enforce POSH compliance across the country. It ordered every State and Union Territory to carry out a district-wise survey, within a tight window, to check whether organisations had constituted their Internal Committees as Section 4 requires. The Court directed District Officers to collect this data on the ground and route it up through the Chief Secretaries.

In plain terms, this is no longer a law that sits quietly in a statute book. The highest court in the country has asked the administrative machinery to go and physically verify which workplaces have a real committee and which have a name on a dusty list. Several states have already begun audits. Inspections have repeatedly found committees that exist only on paper, which is exactly Meera’s situation, and exactly the situation this guide exists to help you avoid.

There is a second shift, just as important for anyone who reports to a board. Changes to the Companies (Accounts) Rules in 2025 added a disclosure duty. In the Board’s Report, companies must now state the number of POSH complaints received, disposed of, and pending for more than 90 days. POSH has moved from an HR housekeeping item to a line that directors personally sign off on. When your CEO or your board asks about POSH now, they are not being cautious. They are managing their own exposure.

And in December 2025, the Supreme Court widened the net again.

In Dr. Sohail Malik v. Union of India, the Court held that a woman could file a complaint with, and be heard by, the Internal Complaints Committee of her own workplace, even when the person she is complaining about works for a different organisation. The case arose between two senior civil servants in different departments, but the interpretation binds all workplaces, including private ones. In plain terms, your ICC can no longer wave away a complaint just because the respondent is a client, a vendor’s employee, or someone from another company who was present at your workplace. If your committee has only ever prepared for complaints between two of your own employees, that assumption is now out of date.

The Internal Complaints Committee: Where Compliance Lives or Dies

Almost every POSH failure I have seen traces back to the Internal Complaints Committee. The Act, after the Repealing and Amending Act, 2016, formally calls it the Internal Committee (IC), but in practice, most HR teams, lawyers, and the wider industry still call it the ICC, so that is the term I will use here. Whatever you call it, get the ICC wrong and everything downstream, the inquiry, the report, the decision, can be challenged. So this is worth getting exactly right.

Who must sit on the committee

Section 4 of the Act requires every employer with ten or more employees to constitute an Internal Complaints Committee (ICC). The composition is specific, and each part of it matters:

• A Presiding Officer, who must be a woman employed at a senior level at your workplace. If no senior woman works at that particular location, you nominate one from another of your offices or from a sister concern. A man cannot hold this position.
• At least two members from among your employees, ideally people committed to the cause of women, or with relevant experience or legal knowledge.
• One external member, from an NGO or association committed to the cause of women, or a person familiar with issues relating to sexual harassment. This seat is the one companies most often leave empty, and it is the one that most often sinks an inquiry.
• At least half of the total members must be women.

Members serve a term of up to three years. The external member exists precisely because they sit outside your payroll and your internal politics, which is why the law bars them from being your employee. They are entitled to a fee per sitting plus travel costs, which the employer pays. Treat that fee as the cheapest insurance you will ever buy, because the external member is often the single thing standing between a defensible inquiry and one that collapses under challenge.

One committee per location

Now, the detail that catches even careful HR heads. You do not constitute the ICC once at the company level. You constitute it at every administrative unit, office, or branch. A company operating in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune needs three Internal Complaints Committees, not one head-office committee, expected to fly across the country for hearings. Parliament wrote the law this way so a woman seeking redress does not have to travel to another city or escalate across the org chart. If you have grown from one city to three and still run a single ICC, you have a gap you may not know about.

Fewer than ten employees

And for the smallest workplaces: if you have fewer than ten employees, you do not constitute an ICC. Complaints in that case go to the Local Committee that the District Officer constitutes for your area. You should still have a policy and still know where to direct a complaint.

Internal Complaints Committee at a glance

Requirement	What the Act asks for
When required	Every workplace with 10 or more employees
Presiding Officer	A senior woman employed at the workplace
Internal members	At least two, from among employees
External member	One, from outside the payroll, familiar with the issue, or from a women’s welfare body
Gender balance	At least half the members must be women
Tenure	Up to three years
Per location	A separate IC at each office, unit, or branch

 

The Timelines You Cannot Miss

Once a complaint is filed, the clock starts, and the Act is precise about it. An aggrieved woman can file a written complaint within three months of the incident, extendable by a further three months if the committee accepts there was good reason for the delay. From there:

• The committee must complete the inquiry within 90 days.
• The committee submits its report to the employer within 10 days of completing the inquiry.
• The employer must act on the recommendations within 60 days.

Throughout, confidentiality is not a courtesy; it is a legal obligation. The identity of the complainant, the respondent, the witnesses, and the details of the proceedings must stay confidential. A breach of confidentiality is itself a violation that carries a penalty. If you remember one thing about running an inquiry, remember that the process must be fair to both sides and silent to everyone else.

What Non-Compliance Actually Costs

People assume the penalty is just a fine, and a small one. The fine is the least of it. Under Section 26, a first offence, such as failing to constitute an ICC or failing to file your annual report, attracts a fine of up to fifty thousand rupees. A repeat offence doubles it. But the tail is far longer than the fine.

For a repeat or serious offender, the consequences escalate to cancellation or non-renewal of the licences and registrations you need to run your business. Read that again, because it is the part that should focus the mind: persistent POSH non-compliance can threaten your ability to legally operate. Add to that the disclosure now required in the Board’s Report, which means directors face personal exposure under company law if the numbers are wrong or absent. And then add the part no statute can quantify: the reputational damage when word gets out that a company’s harassment committee was a fiction, and the talent that quietly walks out the door.

Meera’s company did not get fined. They got something arguably worse. They had to tell a woman who had found the courage to complain that they had to rebuild the process protecting her from scratch, before it could even begin. That delay, that visible unreadiness, did more damage to trust inside that company than any fine would have.

A Practical Compliance Checklist for HR Heads

If you want to walk into your next leadership meeting able to say POSH is genuinely handled, work through this. Not the version on paper. The real one.

• Constitute a valid ICC at every location, with a senior woman as Presiding Officer, at least two internal members, a genuine external member, and at least half women. Check that every named person knows they are on it and has agreed.
• Train the committee. An IC that no one has trained to run an inquiry, document it, and maintain confidentiality is a liability, not a safeguard.
• Write a real policy, specific to your company, your locations, and your reporting lines, not a 2019 template with another company’s city in it. Display it prominently, physically and digitally.
• Run awareness sessions for all employees, at least annually. The 2026 direction of travel, especially for managers, is more frequent sessions that cover digital, remote, and hybrid situations, because that is where harassment now often happens.
• File your annual report with the District Officer every year, on time. This is one of the most common silent failures.
• Register on and use the SHe-Box portal where applicable, and make sure your complaint numbers are ready for the Board’s Report.
• Refresh the committee before terms lapse, and the moment a Presiding Officer or external member leaves. A committee with an empty mandatory seat is not a valid committee.

A Special Note for Foreign Companies Setting Up in India

If you are a US or European company standing up an India entity, POSH will not look like anything in your home jurisdiction, and the instinct to map it onto your global anti-harassment policy will get you into trouble. Three things tend to surprise foreign HR and legal teams.

First, this is statutory, not policy-driven. In the US, you might satisfy harassment obligations largely through policy, training, and the internal complaints process you design. In India, the law prescribes the structure down to who must sit on the committee, where it must sit, and the days within which it must act. Your excellent global policy does not satisfy the Indian statute. You need the Indian structure as well.

Second, the external member requirement has no clean US equivalent. The law compels you to seat someone from outside your own organisation on your harassment committee. That idea is unfamiliar to many foreign teams, so they skip it. It is precisely the failure that voids inquiries.

Third, the per-location rule will catch a company that opens a second India office without revisiting compliance. If you launch in Bengaluru and later add Gurugram, you need a committee in Gurugram too. For a company setting up its first India operation, POSH is one of the statutory pieces you have to build in from day one, alongside PF, ESI, and gratuity, not retrofit after the first complaint.

The Real Lesson from Meera

Meera’s company rebuilt everything. A properly constituted committee at each location, a trained IC, a real policy, a genuine external member, annual reports filed, and current. A committee that finally held legal weight conducted the inquiry that had triggered the whole reckoning and conducted it fairly.

But the lesson she carries, and the one she now repeats to every HR head she mentors, is this. POSH compliance is not the policy in your handbook.

• It is not the poster by the lift.
• It is not the slide deck in your induction pack.
• It is a living structure that has to be ready to function with dignity and legal force on the single most important day, the day someone trusts it enough to come forward.

The companies that get POSH right are not the ones with the fanciest policy document. They are the ones who decided, before any complaint ever arrived, that the structure would hold.

If you are not certain yours would hold today, that uncertainty is your answer. The time to find out is now, on a quiet afternoon of your choosing, not in a cabin one evening with a complaint on your desk and a committee that does not exist.

Who needs to set up an Internal Committee under the POSH Act?
Every employer in India with ten or more employees must constitute an Internal Committee, regardless of how many women it employs. The duty is triggered by total headcount, not gender ratio. Workplaces with fewer than ten employees route complaints instead to the Local Committee constituted by the District Officer for that area.

Does the POSH Act cover men or transgender employees?
No. As drafted, the POSH Act, 2013 protects women only, and does not cover complaints by men, transgender, or non-binary employees. Many Indian companies run a separate gender-neutral anti-harassment policy alongside their statutory committee to close this gap, but that policy does not replace the legal POSH structure.

How many Internal Committees does a multi-office company need?
One at every administrative unit, office, or branch, not a single head-office committee. A company operating in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune needs three. This ensures a woman seeking redress can be heard locally, without travelling to another city or escalating across the organisation to be taken seriously.

What are the POSH inquiry timelines?
A complaint must be filed within three months of the incident, extendable by three more for good reason. The committee must complete its inquiry within ninety days, submit its report within ten days of completing it, and the employer must act on the recommendations within sixty days.

What is the penalty for POSH non-compliance in India?
Under Section 26, a first offence, such as failing to constitute a committee or file the annual report, attracts a fine of up to fifty thousand rupees, doubling for repeat offences. Persistent non-compliance can lead to cancellation or non-renewal of the business licences and registrations that an employer needs to operate.

At Excellential, we help Indian companies and foreign businesses entering India build POSH compliance that works, valid committees, trained members, real policies, and the awareness sessions that turn a statutory obligation into a genuinely safer workplace. With 24 years of L&D experience and partnerships with practising legal specialists, we bring a practical, India-context-aware approach. Explore our POSH training for employees to see how we can help.

Book a Free Consultation.

Has your committee ever been tested by a real complaint? What did you discover about how ready you were? Share in the comments.