{"id":33234,"date":"2026-10-01T10:53:31","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T10:53:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.legalserviceindia.com\/Legal-Articles\/?p=33234"},"modified":"2026-10-01T11:05:33","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T11:05:33","slug":"posh-internal-committee-fair-hearing-natural-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.legalserviceindia.com\/Legal-Articles\/posh-internal-committee-fair-hearing-natural-justice\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond Vishaka: Does the Internal Committee Under the POSH Act Really Give a Fair Hearing?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/span>Abstract<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Most people studying Indian labor law first meet the case of Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan (1997), and most are taught that the story has a happy ending: Parliament eventually passed a law, so the problem is solved. This paper argues that the ending is not that simple. It traces how the Vishaka guidelines grew into the Internal Committee (IC) set up under the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, and asks a plain question: does the IC actually give people a fair hearing, and does the law push employers to make that fairness real? Using the Supreme Court’s 2023 judgment in Aureliano Fernandes v. State of Goa as the main example, along with a short look at later High Court cases, this paper shows that basic problems such as lack of notice, wrong composition, and no real chance to be heard are still showing up in IC inquiries, a full decade after the Act came into force. It then studies Sections 19 and 26 of the Act, the provisions dealing with employer duty and punishment, and argues that these sections mostly punish an employer for not having an IC at all and barely touch an employer whose IC exists but runs an unfair inquiry. The paper closes with four modest reform ideas that keep the IC model but try to fix its weakest points.<\/p>

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