POSH Policy for Companies in India: What the Policy Must Contain and How to Roll It Out Across Teams and Locations

TL;DR: A POSH policy is an employer’s written framework under the POSH Act, 2013 that defines sexual harassment, sets out the complaint and inquiry process, and names the Internal Committee that hears complaints. Under the POSH Act, every workplace with 10 or more employees must constitute its own Internal Committee, so a company with offices in four cities runs four committees, not one. A POSH policy that lives only in the onboarding pack fails quietly: in a 2026 pre-training survey by POSH at Work (The Legal Swan), 22.02% of employees said they were unaware their organisation had a POSH policy. The practical answer is to run the rollout as a per-location operating process, with trained committees, repeated communication and records that feed the annual report and, for covered companies, the Board’s Report.

A POSH policy turns the Act into rules a manager can follow

POSH policy

the written document in which an employer in India states what counts as sexual harassment, whom the policy covers, how to complain, how complaints are inquired into, and what protection each party receives.

The POSH Act, 2013 sets the obligations, and the POSH policy records how one employer will meet them at each of its workplaces. An Internal Committee (IC) is the body an employer constitutes to receive, inquire into and recommend action on sexual harassment complaints. The policy names its members, tells employees how to reach them and binds the organisation to the process the IC runs.

None of this is new. The POSH Act and Rules arrived in 2013, 16 years after the Supreme Court’s Vishaka judgment set interim guidelines, and Nishith Desai Associates’ December 2023 POSH report still observed that proper implementation of the Act “remains a challenge”. Our experience at Astravise suggests the gap rarely sits in the document itself. A POSH policy is only as strong as the Internal Committee that applies it and the employees who know it exists.

What must a POSH policy contain?

Practitioner guidance from eLearnPOSH recommends that a POSH policy cover at least the definition of sexual harassment, a zero-tolerance statement, scope and applicability, the complaint mechanism with IC contact details, the redressal process, the rights and protection of complainant, respondent and witnesses, and the responsibilities of employer and employees. That list is a best-practice checklist rather than a statutory schedule. In practice, a respondent challenging an inquiry, or a court reviewing one, reads the policy against exactly these elements.

The statutory timelines belong in the policy text

According to Comply360’s summary of the POSH Act, a policy should set out the statutory clock: complaints within three months of the incident (extendable by three), inquiry within 90 days, report within 10 days, action within 60 days, appeal within 90 days. IC members, respondents and line managers read the policy far more often than they read the Act. Writing the dates into the policy gives each IC a checklist, and it removes the most common procedural ground on which a respondent attacks an inquiry.

The Act leaves several decisions to the employer

Drafting gaps in the statute give the policy real work to do. Lawyers at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, writing in December 2022, noted that neither the Act nor the Rules say whether an IC report must be unanimous or by majority. The same analysis points out that the Rules set an IC quorum of three including the Presiding Officer, without requiring the external member to attend. A well-drafted policy closes both gaps, for example by specifying majority decisions with recorded dissent and a quorum that includes the external member.

Gender coverage is the second open decision. Complainants under the POSH Act are women, while respondents may be of any gender. Employers may extend their policy to all genders, in which case complaints from men or transgender employees run through company grievance processes, because the IC’s statutory powers apply only to complaints by women. SEI’s 2026 India policy is one published example: it accepts complaints from people of any gender and treats home as an “extended workplace”. Whatever the choice, the policy should state plainly that conciliation cannot be based on a monetary settlement.

Harassment often happens where a narrow policy does not look

The most detailed recent figures on complaint types come from one firm’s caseload rather than a national dataset, and they should be read that way. Of the complaints The Legal Swan handled in 2025, 79.8% involved hostile work environment harassment rather than quid pro quo. In the same caseload, 38.64% of incidents occurred outside physical office premises, at offsites, on business travel, in hotels and at after-hours gatherings.

Two drafting consequences follow. The definition clause has to describe hostile-environment conduct in concrete terms (comments, jokes, messages, images, persistent unwanted attention), because a policy that implies harassment means a manager trading promotion for favours misses much of what an IC actually hears. Equally, the scope clause should define the workplace by relationship rather than by address, covering travel, client sites, offsites, team dinners and remote work.

No government body has published national POSH complaint volumes or compliance rates for 2025 or 2026. Until one does, a company’s own complaint data, broken down by conduct type and setting, is the best evidence it has for revising its POSH policy.

How do you roll out a POSH policy across teams and locations?

A multi-location rollout works when each site is treated as its own compliance unit operating under one shared policy. Astravise recommends the following sequence to companies adding offices, plants or capability centres in India.

1. Map every workplace and its headcount. Under the PoSH Act, each workplace with 10 or more employees must constitute its own Internal Committee, so the first deliverable is a register of sites, headcounts and the IC each one needs. The 10-employee threshold governs constituting an IC and filing the annual report. It does not exempt a smaller office from adopting and publicising the policy.

2. Constitute each Internal Committee to the statutory composition. At least half of IC members must be women, and members serve up to three years. Each committee needs a Presiding Officer and an external member from an NGO or association, or a person familiar with issues relating to sexual harassment. Stagger appointment dates so that every committee in the company does not lapse in the same month.

3. Train IC members before they hear a case. Practitioners at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas report that IC members often have little experience of handling quasi-judicial complaints, and that inquiry reports are frequently challenged in High Courts, with some set aside for failing to follow natural justice. IC training should cover notice to the respondent, the right to be heard, evidence handling and writing a reasoned report. A report that records its reasons survives review far more often than one that records only a conclusion.

4. Publish the policy repeatedly, not once. Practitioners commonly cite one-time onboarding distribution, scattered policy versions and poor record-keeping as the reasons POSH policies fail in practice. Display IC names and contacts at every site and on the intranet, issue the policy in the languages employees actually read, and reissue it whenever a committee changes. A POSH policy that employees cannot find protects no one.

5. Train employees and managers on conduct and confidentiality. In POSH at Work’s pre-training survey, 34.01% of respondents did not recognise abusive or vulgar language as sexual harassment, and 48.00% of employees and 41.14% of managers said they would discuss an ongoing POSH complaint with colleagues. Those are stated intentions before training rather than observed behaviour, but they show where sessions should focus. Managers need a separate module on receiving a complaint, escalating it to the IC and keeping it confidential.

6. Build the record-keeping before the first complaint arrives. Rule 14 requires the IC’s annual report to record complaints received, complaints disposed of, cases pending over 90 days, awareness programmes held and action taken, and employers file it with the District Officer. Under the Companies (Accounts) Second Amendment Rules, 2025, effective 14 July 2025, covered companies’ Board’s Reports must disclose complaints received, disposed of, and pending beyond 90 days. One tracker across all locations, owned centrally and updated by each IC, produces both reports from the same data.

7. Register committee details where the government asks for them. The government relaunched its SHe-Box portal on 29 August 2024 as a central platform for complaints and Internal Committee details. File a copy of each IC’s details as submitted alongside its appointment letter so the record survives staff turnover.

Where does the POSH Act fall short, and what can a policy patch?

The Act’s limits are well documented, though most published criticism dates from 2021 to 2024 and should be read with its date. The Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas analysis flags two practical weaknesses: IC reluctance to inquire into complaints against senior management, and leaks of confidential inquiry information. A policy can answer both by routing complaints against CXOs or directors to a committee where the external member carries real weight, and by treating a confidentiality breach as misconduct in its own right.

Critics also point to the Act’s design. A 2024 IJFMR paper notes that the Act protects only women complainants and does not provide for anonymous complaints, and attributes many implementation failures to weak awareness and under-trained committee members. Practitioner critics argued in 2021 that the per-location IC requirement and unclear compensation criteria burden employers, especially multi-site small businesses. Nishith Desai Associates adds that women may hesitate to complain for fear of being disbelieved.

Penalties under the Act are modest; court awards are not

Under Section 26 of the Act, as summarised by Comply360, employers who fail to comply face a fine of up to ₹50,000, twice that for a repeat offence, and possible loss of business licences or registrations. For a mid-sized company the fine is small. The licence exposure is not, and neither are the sums courts have ordered in individual cases.

The two court figures are reported judgments summarised by eLearnPOSH, and the final position after any appeal should be read from the orders themselves. Their point for a policy owner is simple: the real cost of a failed POSH process is set by a court, not by the statutory fine.

Sources

1. India POSH Research Reports 2025 | POSH at Work (The Legal Swan (POSH at Work), report ‘The Quiet Crisis’)

2. [PDF] Prevention of Sexual Harassment at the Workplace (POSH) (Nishith Desai Associates, 2023-12-01)

3. All you need to know about POSH Act (eLearnPOSH (describing a Government of India portal))

4. What Is The PoSH Act In India? Employer & Employee Guide (Comply360 (summarising Section 26, PoSH Act, 2013), 2026-09-15)

5. POSH Act – Implementational Challenges | India Corporate Law (Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas)

6. POSH Policy | SEI U.S. (SEI (company policy reflecting the POSH Act and Rules))

7. The POSH Act: A Critical Analysis of Its Limitations and Impact – IJFMR (Md. Imran Wahab, IPS — IJFMR, 2024-12-10)

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Astravise’s Strategic CHRO team works with companies setting up or expanding across India to draft the POSH policy, constitute and train each Internal Committee, and build the tracker behind the annual report and Board’s Report disclosure. Book a POSH policy and Internal Committee review with Astravise before your next location opens.