POSH News: ICC Finds IIT Madras Professor Guilty Of Sexual Harassment

Written by: Rajkanya Mahapatra

Every week we bring you a roundup of news and opinion on the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, popularly called the POSH Act, from Indian media, focusing on workplace sexual harassment and its far-reaching effect on equality, equity and mental health of employees of diverse gender identities.

Here are six reported stories on POSH between Jan 18 and Jan 31, 2021: 

1) The Internal Complaints Committee at IIT Madras has found Assistant Professor Mathava Kumar guilty of sexual harassment and has requested for stringent action to be taken against him. The complainant, a PhD scholar, accused Kumar of using his position as her PhD guide and exploiting her vulnerability of being a single mother, to make sexual advances. The complainant had earlier asked for her guide to be changed. 

Bhaskar Ramamurthi, IIT Madras director had signed off on the ICC’s recommendations on actions to be taken against Kumar in October, last year. Action has been pending as Kumar had filed an appeal against the decision in the Madras HC. 

Read more about the story, here.

2) Last week, Smriti Irani, who heads the Ministry of Women and Child Development, received postcards from 3000 domestic workers who requested for safer workplaces. The domestic workers’ requests were an attempt to highlight the poor implementation of the POSH Act in the unorganised sector – where 94% of India’s working women are employed.

Read more about the story, here.

3) An ex-officer of the DHJS (Delhi Higher Judicial Services) was dismissed from work after a woman ahalmad filed two sexual harassment complaints against him. The Delhi High Court upheld the dismissal last week.

Both of these complaints were filed by the aggrieved in July, 2016. After the ICC investigation that did not find the accused guilty, the disciplinary hearings by the High Court lasted until 2018. The accused was finally terminated from service with approval from the Govt. NCT Of Delhi almost four years after the incident.

Read more about the story, here.

4) Owner of a four-year-old web designing firm in Chennai was booked for sexual harassment after his women employees reported him to the police for installing CCTV cameras in the women’s toilet.

Read more about the story, here.

5) A 33-year-old in Ahmedabad filed a sexual harassment complaint at the women’s police station against the head of the institution where she worked. The accused allegedly began to allot more HR-related tasks to the complainant which she didn’t want to take up. He began to use objectionable language targeted at her and sexually harass her. In the FIR, the complainant has said that she’d made her objections about his behaviour known. She quit her job in December last year.

Read more about the story, here.

6) SriLankan Airlines has been fined INR 50,000 by the Patiala House Court for not constituting an internal complaints committee as directed under the POSH Act. The complainant said that she’d reported the incident immediately after it had happened to her seniors, and was waiting for action to be taken against the accused who is a high-ranking employee in the company. 

The complainant filed a formal complaint after realising that no action was being taken against the accused. The employer, in this case, SriLankan Airlines, was not only not supportive of the complainant but also terminated her from service. 

Read more about the story, here.

Image used for representation only. Credit: Kai Hendry/Flickr

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