PoSH Act Compliance for Employers: Internal Committee, Annual Filing and What Multi-Location Companies Get Wrong

Most organisations that fail PoSH compliance have a policy, a committee and a training deck. What they do not have is an Internal Committee at every office, a current nomination order, and an annual report filed with the District Officer. Those three gaps account for the majority of what I see, and all three are cheap to close.

TL;DR: The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 requires an employer to constitute an Internal Committee by written order, and the proviso to Section 4(1) requires one at every administrative unit or office where the workplace is spread across locations. The Committee must file an annual report each calendar year with the employer and the District Officer under Section 21, and the employer must report case numbers under Section 22. Failure to constitute a Committee or to act under Section 22 carries a fine of up to fifty thousand rupees under Section 26, with double punishment and possible cancellation of licence or registration on repeat conviction. Since the Supreme Court’s directions in Aureliano Fernandes v State of Goa in 2023, enforcement has moved from dormant to active.

What the Act Actually Requires of an Employer

Section 19 sets out the employer’s duties, and they are broader than most policies acknowledge. Every employer shall provide a safe working environment, including safety from persons coming into contact at the workplace, and display at a conspicuous place the penal consequences of sexual harassment together with the order constituting the Internal Committee.

The duties continue. Organise workshops and awareness programmes at regular intervals to sensitise employees, and orientation programmes for Committee members. Provide the Committee with the facilities it needs to conduct an inquiry. Assist in securing the attendance of the respondent and witnesses. Make available information the Committee requires. Assist a woman who chooses to file a criminal complaint. Treat sexual harassment as misconduct under the service rules and initiate action accordingly. And monitor the timely submission of reports by the Internal Committee.

Read that last one again. Monitoring the Committee’s filings is an express statutory duty of the employer, not an administrative courtesy the Committee does on its own initiative.

Two structural points that are frequently misunderstood. The Internal Committee obligation attaches to workplaces employing ten or more workers; where an establishment has fewer than ten, or where the complaint is against the employer, jurisdiction sits with the Local Committee constituted by the District Officer under Section 6. And the obligation is a day-one obligation for a new entity, not something triggered by growth, which is why it appears in our guide to setting up in India in 2026 alongside the other statutory clocks.

Constituting the Internal Committee Correctly

Section 4 requires the employer to constitute the Committee by an order in writing. That phrase does a lot of work: an email naming three people is not a constitution order, and in an inquiry that becomes contested, the order is the first document requested.

The composition requirements are specific. The Presiding Officer shall be a woman employed at a senior level at the workplace from amongst the employees. Where another office or administrative unit has no senior-level woman employee, the Presiding Officer shall be nominated from another workplace of the same employer, or another department or organisation. At least one half of the total members nominated shall be women. Members hold office for a period not exceeding three years from the date of nomination.

The Act also requires an external member drawn from a non-governmental organisation or association committed to the cause of women, or a person familiar with issues relating to sexual harassment.

Four defects account for most invalid committees, and none of them is exotic.

The order is stale. Members leave, the three-year term expires, nobody re-issues the order. A Committee whose term has lapsed is not a Committee, and an inquiry it conducts is exposed on that ground alone.

The gender balance has slipped. One-half is a floor, and a single departure can breach it.

There is no external member, or the external member has not attended in two years. This is the most commonly missing element, and the easiest for a complainant’s counsel to identify.

The Presiding Officer is not senior enough, or is not a woman employed at the workplace. In smaller units this is genuinely difficult, which is precisely why the Act provides for nomination from another location of the same employer.

The Multi-Location Trap

This is the provision that catches large employers, and it is written plainly.

The proviso to Section 4(1) states that where the offices or administrative units of the workplace are located at different places or at divisional or sub-divisional level, the Internal Committee shall be constituted at all administrative units or offices.

Not one Committee for the company. One at each administrative unit or office.

The pattern I see is a well-run organisation with a properly composed Committee at head office, a policy circulated group-wide, and four regional offices, two plants and a delivery centre with no Committee of their own. Everyone believes they are compliant. On the face of the proviso, six locations are not.

Three practical consequences follow.

The first is that a complaint raised at a location without a Committee has nowhere valid to go. Routing it to the head office Committee is not what the statute contemplates, and the procedural objection arrives later, at the worst possible time.

The second is the senior woman problem. A small unit may genuinely have no senior-level woman employee. The Act anticipates this and permits nomination from another workplace of the same employer. That is the designed solution, and it is available. What is not available is treating the difficulty as a reason not to constitute the Committee.

The third is that this obligation follows your footprint, not your headcount plan. Open a second office and the obligation attaches to it. For organisations running distributed or hybrid models, the question of what constitutes an office at all deserves a deliberate answer rather than a default one.

If you are running an Employer of Record or contractor arrangement, ask where in that chain the obligation sits and get the answer in writing. It exists somewhere, and “we assumed the provider handled it” is not a position.

Annual Filing: The Deadline Nobody Diarises

Section 21 requires the Internal Committee, in each calendar year, to prepare an annual report in the prescribed form and submit it to the employer and the District Officer. The District Officer then forwards a brief report to the State Government.

Section 22 places a separate duty on the employer: include the number of cases filed and their disposal in the organisation’s annual report, or where no such report is required, intimate the number of cases to the District Officer.

Two things to note about this pair.

It runs on the calendar year, not the financial year. An organisation that runs everything on an April to March cycle will diarise this wrongly, and often does.

And it is required whether or not anything happened. A nil return is still a return. The most common filing failure I encounter is not a late report; it is an organisation that received no complaints, concluded there was nothing to file, and filed nothing for three years.

The prescribed contents under the Rules cover the number of complaints received in the year, the number disposed of, the number of cases pending for more than ninety days, the number of workshops and awareness programmes carried out, and the nature of action taken by the employer. That last item is worth reading as a design instruction: if you have run no awareness programmes, the annual report is where that becomes visible to a District Officer.

The listed-company dimension is separate and additional. Where a Board’s Report is prepared, PoSH disclosure sits inside it, which means the numbers reach your auditors and, for listed entities, your shareholders. This is one of the reasons PoSH belongs on the governance calendar rather than in an HR folder, a point we develop in the GCC governance blueprint.

Penalties, and Why the Number Understates the Risk

Section 26 provides that where an employer fails to constitute an Internal Committee under Section 4(1), or fails to take action under Sections 13, 14 and 22, or contravenes or abets contravention of the Act or Rules, the employer shall be punishable with a fine which may extend to fifty thousand rupees.

On repeat conviction for the same offence, the employer is liable to twice the punishment, subject to the statutory maximum, and to cancellation of licence, or withdrawal, non-renewal or cancellation of the registration required to carry on the business or activity.

Fifty thousand rupees is not a deterrent for a company of any size, and treating it as the measure of exposure is the mistake. The real exposure sits elsewhere: an inquiry set aside for procedural defect and reopened, a writ petition, the reputational consequence of a public finding that no valid Committee existed, and the second-conviction provision that reaches business registration rather than the bank balance.

Note also the inquiry timelines the Committee has to meet. The inquiry must be completed within ninety days under Section 11(4), and the report provided to the employer or District Officer within ten days of completion under Section 13. A complaint must ordinarily be made within three months of the incident, with the Committee able to extend that by up to a further three months for reasons recorded in writing. A Committee that has never been trained will miss these, and the missed deadline is what turns a defensible process into a contested one.

What the Supreme Court Changed

In Aureliano Fernandes v State of Goa, Civil Appeal No. 2482 of 2014, decided on 12 May 2023, the Supreme Court set aside an inquiry for breach of natural justice and then went considerably further. It directed the Union, all State Governments and Union Territories to undertake a time-bound exercise verifying whether ministries, departments, public sector undertakings, authorities, institutions and bodies had constituted Committees, and whether their composition was strictly in terms of the Act.

The Court also directed that details of Internal and Local Committees, including constitution, composition, email addresses, contact numbers and the procedure for filing complaints, be readily available on the organisation’s website and kept updated.

That is a public, checkable obligation. Anyone can open your website and see whether it is met, which is a materially different enforcement environment from one where a District Officer might eventually ask.

The Court has continued to monitor. Subsequent orders extended to a nationwide survey by Chief Secretaries to identify public and private entities without Committees. Alongside this, the revamped SHe-Box portal launched in August 2024 functions as a central repository, and jurisdictions including the NCT of Delhi have directed entities to register their Committees on it. We covered the governance implications of that shift separately in the portal nobody talked about.

A Compliance Checklist

1. Issue a written constitution order for every office and administrative unit, with dates of nomination and expiry.

2. Diarise the three-year term. Set a reminder at thirty months, not at expiry.

3. Appoint and actually use the external member. Confirm attendance, and record it.

4. Publish Committee details on your website, including composition, contact details and how to file, and refresh them whenever a member changes.

5. Display the constitution order and penal consequences at each location, in a place people actually pass.

6. Run the workshops. They are a statutory duty under Section 19 and a reported item in the annual return.

7. Train every Committee member on procedure, particularly the ninety-day inquiry limit and the ten-day report.

8. File the annual report each calendar year, including a nil return, and keep proof of submission to the District Officer.

9. Check where the obligation sits for contract, outsourced and Employer of Record populations, in writing.

10. Put the whole thing on the governance calendar with a named owner at board level.

A Closing Note

PoSH compliance is unusual among statutory obligations in that the cost of doing it properly is close to trivial and the cost of doing it badly is not measured in fines at all.

Everything in this piece is administrative. Issue the orders. Name the members. Publish the details. File the return. None of it requires budget approval, and all of it takes an afternoon per location.

What it does require is an owner. In most organisations I have worked with, PoSH sits nowhere in particular. It is assumed to be HR’s, HR assumes the policy covers it, and the policy was last reviewed by someone who left. Governance failures rarely come from bad intent. They come from an obligation that belongs to everyone and therefore to no one.

Put a name against it, put the dates in the calendar, and this stops being a risk.

If you are reviewing your position across multiple locations, or standing up committees for a newly incorporated entity, Astravise Services works on HR governance and compliance frameworks for organisations scaling across sites, including through our fractional CHRO advisory. Start by counting your offices, then count your committees. If the two numbers differ, you have your first action.

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