Eight women employees at the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) campus in Nashik say the harassment began in July 2022 and didn’t stop until March 2026.
That’s nearly four years of alleged sexual harassment, coercion, and intimidation inside one of India’s most disclosure-compliant employers, playing out alongside a grievance system that, on paper, was working.
Here’s the uncomfortable part. TCS’s own annual disclosures recorded 125 complaints under the POSH Act in Financial Year 2025 (FY25), up from 110 in FY24 and 49 in FY23. That’s the highest disclosed POSH number in the Nifty 50. But the Nashik complaints didn’t even make the cut to those 125.
If one of India’s best-disclosed POSH employers can have a four-year gap between when a complaint is raised and when it is recorded, the reporting gap isn’t a small-company problem or a compliance edge case. It’s structural.
What the Nashik case already tells us about the law
Before looking at what the aggregate data say, it’s worth sitting with what the Nashik case reveals about two aspects of the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, or the POSH Act.
Both are recent rulings by the Supreme Court and the High Court. Both explain why Nashik played out the way it did. And both are central to the widening reporting gap, even as awareness grows.
The three-month filing window is a trap for survivors
Under Section 9 of the POSH Act, complaints must be filed within three months of the last incident, extendable to six at the IC’s discretion. In Vaneeta Patnaik v. Nirmal Kanti Chakrabarti (2025), the Supreme Court dismissed a harassment complaint as time-barred even while calling the allegations grave, because the last incident fell outside the six-month window.
That ruling matters for Nashik. With harassment incidents dating back to 2022, had the women tried the IC route in 2026, they would have been legally invalid. The police complaint was arguably the only route left.
This sets up a pattern: Section 9 of the POSH Act, as currently interpreted, pushes survivors either to file fast or not file at all, and multi-year harassment patterns slip straight out of the grievance system.
What “counts” as sexual harassment has finally been clarified
The second piece worth understanding upfront is what the Madras High Court settled in January 2025. In HCL Technologies Ltd. v. N. Parthasarathy, the Court held that unwelcome physical proximity, insisting on handshakes, touching shoulders, and asking personal questions about menstrual cycles all amount to sexual harassment under the POSH Act, with the impact on the aggrieved woman weighing more than the respondent’s intent.
Nashik survivor testimony maps almost line-by-line onto that ruling. Definitional clarity exists in law. It just hasn’t reached the floor. Which matters because the “did this even count” question is the single most common reason women don’t file in the first place.
The reporting gap at scale
Ashoka University’s Centre for Economic Data and Analysis (CEDA), in collaboration with Business Standard, analysed annual reports filed by 300 National Stock Exchange (NSE) -300 companies. Between FY14 and FY25, POSH complaints at these firms grew by 974%, from 161 cases to 1,729. A 974% jump sounds like a success story.
Look at the denominator, and it looks different. In FY25, POSH complaints accounted for just 5.8% of total workplace grievances at these 300 firms, and 0.1% of the female workforce. Women make up only 20% of the 6.6 million employees at NSE-300 companies. A 974% jump on a small base is still a small base.
What the MCA numbers now show, and what they hide
India’s MCA governs company disclosures. Its Board Report requirements determine what listed and unlisted companies must publicly disclose about their operations, including compliance with workplace harassment policies.
For most of the POSH Act’s life, those requirements covered only a sliver of Indian companies. That changed in mid-2025, and it’s worth understanding in detail because it will reshape what “POSH data” looks like over the next decade.
A notification that changed the disclosure rulebook
For most of the POSH Act’s life, the public disclosure requirement had a loophole. Under Rule 8(5)(x) of the Companies (Accounts) Rules, 2014, only listed companies had to report POSH compliance in their Board’s Report.
Every unlisted company, every private company, and a vast chunk of the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise (MSME) base were exempt from disclosing any specific details about harassment complaints.
That ended on July 14, 2025.
Through the Companies (Accounts) Second Amendment Rules, 2025, notified on May 30, 2025, the MCA extended the disclosure requirement to every company incorporated under the Companies Act, 2013.
Listed or unlisted, public or private, with only One Person Companies (OPCs) and Small Companies getting relief. The universe of affected filers is roughly 1.6 million companies, an order of magnitude bigger than the NSE-300 frame analysts watched before.
What’s now mandatory in Form AOC-4
Board Reports must now include the number of POSH complaints received during the financial year, the number disposed of, and the number pending for more than 90 days. Alongside that, a gender-wise headcount of employees (female, male, transgender) and a statement of compliance with the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961.
Non-disclosure attracts a penalty of up to ₹3 lakh on the company and ₹50,000 on every officer in default. Startups, OPCs, and Small Companies receive limited relief, but even then, the exposure remains meaningful.
The gap this closes, and the TCS exception that exposes
What did POSH disclosure look like before the amendment?
An analysis of 300 NSE-listed companies for FY23 found that 219 of them reported zero POSH cases. Fourteen of the top 100 had never reported a single case since the POSH Act came into force in 2013. A 2024 survey of 200 senior HR professionals found 59% of companies hadn’t even constituted a legally compliant Internal Committee.
That’s one end of the spectrum. Companies with no complaints on record because their reporting machinery is either absent or asleep.
TCS Nashik sits at the other end. TCS disclosed 125 POSH complaints in FY25, 78 upheld, and 23 pending at year-end. The kind of number that corporate governance analysts cite as evidence of a mature reporting culture. And Nashik exposes what a high-disclosure number can still hide.
So the MCA amendment closes one gap. For the first time, complaint data is pulled into the public record for roughly 1.6 million companies, well beyond the 300 NSE-listed ones analysts watch.
What the rule can’t do is verify whether a zero-reporting disclosure reflects a genuinely safe workplace or a broken intake pipeline. It can’t see complaints that never reach the IC. That’s the exact mechanism the Nashik FIRs allege.
The SHe-Box story: 254 complaints in a workforce of 180 million
SHe-Box, short for Sexual Harassment electronic Box, is the central government’s online complaint platform run by the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD). Any woman who has faced workplace sexual harassment can file directly through the portal, which routes the complaint to the appropriate IC or Local Committee.
On paper, it’s meant to be the backstop when internal systems fail. In practice, its usage numbers reveal how far India is from that ideal.
A portal rebuilt by the Supreme Court order
India’s first SHe-Box portal launched in 2017 and quietly stagnated. Its relaunch in August 2024 wasn’t a voluntary product refresh. It was an outcome of the Supreme Court’s directions in Aureliano Fernandes v. State of Goa, which held that POSH implementation across government and institutional workplaces was so patchy that central monitoring was needed.
On August 12, 2025, the Court went further. States were directed to conduct district-wise surveys to verify the IC constitution across workplaces and upload the findings to SHe-Box. Labour Commissioners and District Officers were tasked with collection, Chief Secretaries with transmission. Section 26 penalties for non-compliance, up to ₹50,000 and potential license cancellation for repeat violations, were reiterated as available.
What the Parliamentary disclosures reveal
MWCD data tabled in Parliament in February 2026 gave us the current SHe-Box numbers. 254 complaints were filed on the portal throughout 2025. Cumulatively, since the August 2024 revamp, 296 complaints have come through, with 105 resolved. Over 148,700 workplaces have been onboarded.
On the face of it, 148,700 workplaces onboarded is real infrastructure progress. What sits awkwardly next to it is the 254 figure.
The denominator problem, and what the Nashik women chose
India’s female labour force is roughly 180 million women, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) estimates. A flagship national grievance redressal portal receiving 254 complaints in a full calendar year works out to roughly one complaint per 700,000 working women.
Compare that against what independent survey research has been saying for years. Indian Bar Association’s widely cited estimate puts formal reporting of workplace harassment at about 7% of women who experience it.
If even a small slice of that 7% were routing through SHe-Box, we’d be looking at lakhs of complaints, not hundreds. So the 254 figure doesn’t signal that harassment is rare. It signals that the formal channel is still largely unused, even after the SC-ordered relaunch and the onboarding push.
What the inclusion benchmarks miss
Aggregate MCA and SHe-Box data tells us what’s being counted. It doesn’t tell us who the counting system leaves out. There are many women whom the law covers but who still don’t report the cases. And then there are employees whom POSH wasn’t written to protect.
The Employees POSH isn’t written for
The POSH Act, 2013, protects only women. Trans employees, non-binary employees, and men facing workplace sexual harassment have no direct statutory pathway under POSH. They have to rely on the Indian Penal Code / Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (IPC/BNS), general company policies, or civil remedies. No equivalent of an IC or an SHe-Box route exists for them.
Even in the TCS Nashik case, reports suggest that at least one male employee was among the complainants at the TCS campus. Under the POSH Act, as currently drafted, his complaint has no direct statutory redressal channel.
Even the Supreme Court’s most recent expansion of IC jurisdiction doesn’t close this gap. In Dr Sohail Malik v. Union of India (decided December 10, 2025), the SC held that an IC at the aggrieved woman’s workplace can conduct a preliminary inquiry even when the respondent is employed in a different government department.
A meaningful procedural fix. But the ruling, like the Act itself, operates within the “aggrieved woman” frame. Statutory coverage still maintains a male- and queer-employee-shaped hole.
Which is where the India Workplace Equality Index (IWEI) becomes useful, less as a POSH dataset and more as a proxy for what’s missing. IWEI, run by the Keshav Suri Foundation, Pride Circle, and Stonewall UK, benchmarks LGBT+ inclusion across nine parameters at self-selected Indian employers.
Gold, Silver, and Bronze recipients like Wipro, Encore Capital, VMware, and similar firms voluntarily extend anti-harassment coverage beyond the POSH Act’s scope. For the rest of India Inc., that coverage gap is structural and invisible.
What independent research adds
A 2025 study published in the International Journal for Multidisciplinary Research (IJFMR) on access to justice in POSH cases is worth pulling numbers from. Among women who had actually experienced workplace harassment, the study found that 33% left their organisations rather than report, 33% didn’t know what their options were after the incident, and 17% stayed silent and continued working in the same organisation.
50% of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) surveyed were non-compliant with the POSH Act. Only 28% of organisations had a formal no-retaliation policy protecting complainants.
This means that two-thirds of women who experience workplace harassment either quit or are unaware of a complaint channel. Half of SMEs aren’t compliant to begin with. And even at compliant organisations, fewer than three in ten offer the one protection that matters most when you’re considering whether to file, a guarantee that filing won’t end your career.
What the three datasets say together
MCA disclosures tell us what companies wrote down. SHe-Box tells us what women formally filed. Inclusion indices and independent surveys tell us what actually happens. The delta between those three is the reporting gap. And the TCS Nashik timeline, four years of alleged harassment, zero formal IC records for most of it, and nine FIRs in April 2026, is that delta made physical.
Why under-reporting persists
The data tells us the gap exists. Understanding why it persists requires looking at the mechanisms, the places where complaints get absorbed, deflected, or aged out of the system before they become formal records.
When the IC itself is the barrier
When an IC member is organisationally senior enough to “neutralise” complaints, they are functionally part of the employer’s authority.
The Delhi High Court pointed to this directly in X v. Akademi and Ors., decided on August 28, 2025. An “employer” under the POSH Act isn’t defined by designation alone, the Court held, but by real control over the workplace, its administration, or its employees.
Where a complaint is against such a person, the IC lacks jurisdiction, and the matter must be referred to the Local Complaints Committee (LC).
Apply that logic to a scenario in which a senior HR member who sits on the IC is accused of abetting harassment. The very premise of an internal committee hearing the case breaks down. When the same person is expected to both hear the grievance and protect the organisation, “I’ll report it” quietly becomes “nothing will happen.“
Informal neutralisation before complaints become formal
Legal experts covering Nashik have been pointing at a specific mechanism. Complaints are being “informally neutralised” before they ever reach IC intake. An employee raises something with a manager. It gets escalated to HR. HR logs it as an interpersonal issue, never a POSH complaint.
No formal intake. No 90-day timeline. No inquiry mandated. No disclosure made.
Which is how a company can report a low number of POSH complaints to its board and its regulators while harbouring a multi-year harassment pattern on one of its campuses.
The three-month limitation cliff
A complaint must be filed within three months of the last incident, extendable to six at the IC’s discretion. In Vaneeta Patnaik v. Nirmal Kanti Chakrabarti (2025), the Supreme Court dismissed a harassment complaint as time-barred, even while acknowledging the gravity of the allegations.
This was because the last incident of harassment allegedly took place eight months before the date of the complaint. The incident, as per the Court, was beyond both the three-month period and the extended six-month outer limit.
For survivors, that clock is a disincentive, not a deadline. Trauma can take longer than three months to process. Career calculations take longer than three months to resolve. Deciding whether to end a marriage, relocate, or quit a job takes longer than three months. The law, in its current form, asks survivors to file before most of those decisions are made.
Nashik sits on the wrong side of that cliff by design. Harassment alleged to have begun in 2022 was beyond the IC’s legal reach by 2023. By 2026, the FIR route was the only remaining option.
Ambiguity about what “counts”
Across Indian POSH research, one finding recurs. Women are unclear about what legally constitutes sexual harassment, particularly in the “soft” category of unwanted proximity, personal questions, and casual touching. That ambiguity is itself a driver of under-reporting. Women don’t file because they’re not sure they have a case.
HCL Technologies v. Parthasarathy resolved that ambiguity at the judicial level. Hearing a challenge to an IC’s findings against a male supervisor, the Madras High Court catalogued the behaviours the Complainants had raised.
Standing in close physical proximity and insisting on handshakes. Touching a woman’s shoulder while telling her to remove her clothes for physical measurements. Asking another about her menstrual cycle. All of it, the Court held, amounts to sexual harassment under the POSH Act, and the impact on the aggrieved woman weighs more than the respondent’s intent.
A legal sea-change, for a category of behaviour long dismissed as “interpersonal friction” or “just how he is.” The ruling came in January 2025. How many of the women who experienced similar behaviour in the last 15 months know this ruling exists? The gap between legal clarity and survivor-side awareness is its own driver of under-reporting.
Fear of retaliation and career fallout
Only 28% of firms have explicit no-retaliation policies, per IJFMR. A third of women who do report end up quitting their jobs rather than staying. That’s not a footnote. That’s the dominant post-complaint experience in the Indian corporate sector.
Nashik testimony carries a concrete example. One complainant alleged she was made to work in isolation on a rooftop and had her belongings confiscated. Young women, police sources told NDTV, were specifically targeted and exploited based on perceived vulnerability. None of that is an outlier. It’s the retaliation playbook.
The informal and MSME blind spot
More than 90% of India’s workforce is in the informal sector. ICs don’t exist there. The fallback is the Local Complaints Committee at the district level, and LC coverage is patchy at best across India’s 700+ districts.
Supreme Court’s August 2025 direction for district-wise LC surveys, embedded in the Aureliano Fernandes follow-up, is an implicit acknowledgement that the LC channel isn’t functioning as a national safety net. It’s trying to become one.
For MSMEs, the picture isn’t much better. That IJFMR 50% non-compliance figure for SMEs means half of India’s small and medium employers don’t even have the first layer of POSH infrastructure in place.
What recent rulings and rules signal about FY26
Several of the rulings discussed in earlier sections are part of a larger pattern. Throughout 2025, Indian courts have broadened what constitutes harassment, the scope of ICs, and who qualifies as an employer under POSH. Taken together with the MCA’s new disclosure regime, these changes point to a materially different compliance environment for FY26 and beyond. This section synthesises what that shift means.
SC expands IC jurisdiction
Dr Sohail Malik v. Union of India removed one of the most common procedural barriers that complainants face in cross-department or multi-entity harassment cases. Being told the IC at their workplace can’t touch a respondent who reports elsewhere.
The Supreme Court held the opposite. An IC at the aggrieved woman’s workplace can conduct a preliminary inquiry even when the respondent is in a different government department or employer.
Delhi HC re-reads “employer” under POSH
X v. Akademi and Ors. redefined who counts as an “employer” under the Act. Not the person on the org chart. The person who exercises real control over the workplace, its administration, or its employees. Where a complaint is against such a person, jurisdiction moves to the Local Committee.
Post-Nashik, this ruling will likely be cited aggressively. If a senior HR member on an IC is herself accused of abetting harassment, she’s functionally part of the employer’s authority, and the LC route becomes the right jurisdictional destination. CEO-respondent and senior-HR-on-the-IC loopholes are now closing at the judicial level.
Impact over intent becomes the standard
HCL v. Parthasarathy sits alongside Sr Sohail Malik and X v. Akademi cases as the third leg of a 2025 judicial trend. Widening what counts as harassment. The ambiguity over what does and does not count as harassment has been clarified, hence simplifying the filing process.
The combined signal for FY26
Put the pieces together. Mandatory MCA disclosures across roughly 1.6 million companies. SHe-Box as a centralised monitoring platform. District-level IC surveys mandated by the Supreme Court. Expanded IC and LC jurisdiction through Sohail Malik and X v. Akademi. An impact-over-intent standard for what harassment includes.
What’s likely post-Nashik? Sharper board-level scrutiny of IC composition, especially the presence of senior HR on Internal Committees in conflicted positions. Audit trails of informal complaints, the ones currently dying before formal intake. Possibly Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI)-level listing disclosure tightening for large employers, pushing POSH numbers from the board report into the corporate governance section, where investors actually read them.
FY26 Board Reports, the first set to be filed post-September 2026 under the new MCA regime, are the first real test. Either mandatory disclosure produces cleaner data, or it produces more creative zero-reporting. We’ll know by the end of next year.
In the End…
TCS Nashik will be remembered less as an anomaly and more as the moment India Inc. had to confront what its own disclosure numbers were hiding. The reporting gap isn’t one gap. It’s three stacked.
There’s a compliance gap, the one that the May 2025 MCA amendment is starting to close, covering which companies bother to set up ICs and publicly disclose complaint numbers.
There’s a trust gap, which the three-month limitation cliff upheld in the Vaneeta Patnaik case actively widens, covering whether employees believe the system will protect them if they file.
And there’s a coverage gap that the Sohail Malik case partially addressed, but only within the “aggrieved woman” frame, which questions who the law protects at all.
MCA amendment and SHe-Box relaunch are infrastructure fixes. They make under-reporting visible in a way it wasn’t before, which is progress. They don’t cure it.
Recent legal precedents in courts indicate that the judiciary is moving faster than corporate HR on what constitutes harassment, where ICs can reach, and who counts as an employer. The remaining lag is organisational.
Functional ICs with independently selected members, rather than senior HR members carrying reporting-line conflicts. Audit trails for informal and formal complaints. Real no-retaliation protection, rather than policy statements. Trained investigators. Board-level ownership of IC composition.
A high POSH complaint number isn’t a scandal. Often, it’s a sign that the system is working and that employees trust it enough to come forward. The scandal is a low number paired with a four-year backchannel.
FY26 will tell us whether India Inc. is building safer workplaces or just better paperwork. Nashik already gave us a preview of what happens when the paperwork doesn’t match the floor.
FAQs
Why are POSH complaints in India under-reported despite rising awareness?
POSH complaints remain under-reported due to three structural gaps: a compliance gap where many companies lack functional Internal Committees, a trust gap driven by the three-month filing limit and fear of retaliation, and a coverage gap where informal workers, male employees, and LGBT+ workers fall outside the Act’s “aggrieved woman” frame. Only 28% of Indian firms have explicit no-retaliation policies, and a third of women who report end up leaving their jobs.
What does the TCS Nashik case reveal about POSH reporting in India?
The TCS Nashik case involves eight women alleging harassment between July 2022 and March 2026, yet none of these complaints appeared in TCS’s disclosed 125 POSH cases for FY25. It demonstrates how even India’s most disclosure-compliant employers can harbour multi-year harassment patterns through informal neutralisation, where complaints are logged as interpersonal issues before reaching formal IC intake.
What changed in MCA’s POSH disclosure rules in 2025?
Through the Companies (Accounts) Second Amendment Rules, 2025, notified on May 30, 2025, and effective July 14, 2025, POSH disclosure requirements now extend to every company incorporated under the Companies Act, 2013, amounting to roughly 1.6 million companies. Form AOC-4 must now include complaints received, disposed of, and pending beyond 90 days, with penalties up to ₹3 lakh for non-disclosure.
How many POSH complaints were filed on SHe-Box in 2025?
According to MWCD data tabled in Parliament in February 2026, 254 complaints were filed on SHe-Box throughout 2025. Cumulatively since the August 2024 relaunch, 296 complaints have been received with 105 resolved, despite over 148,700 workplaces being onboarded, one complaint per 700,000 working women.
What is the three-month rule under the POSH Act and why is it problematic?
Section 9 of the POSH Act requires complaints to be filed within three months of the last incident, extendable to six months at the IC’s discretion. In Vaneeta Patnaik v. Nirmal Kanti Chakrabarti (2025), the Supreme Court dismissed a harassment complaint as time-barred even while acknowledging its gravity, effectively pushing survivors to file fast or not at all.
Does POSH Act protect male and LGBT+ employees in India?
No. The POSH Act, 2013 protects only women. Transgender, non-binary, and male employees facing workplace sexual harassment have no direct statutory pathway under POSH and must rely on the IPC/BNS, general company policies, or civil remedies. The India Workplace Equality Index tracks employers that voluntarily extend coverage beyond POSH’s scope.
What did the HCL Technologies v. Parthasarathy ruling clarify?
In January 2025, the Madras High Court held that unwelcome physical proximity, insisting on handshakes, touching shoulders, and asking personal questions about menstrual cycles all constitute sexual harassment under the POSH Act. The ruling established that impact on the aggrieved woman weighs more than the respondent’s intent.
