Policy Update
Samiksha Muskan
Background
Sexual Harassment at the workplace remains one of the most underreported and neglected dimensions of gender-based violence in India. Despite the landmark Supreme Court judgment in Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan (1997) laying down binding guidelines nearly three decades ago, and the subsequent enactment of the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act in 2013, also known as the POSH Act, the implementation has remained structurally weak, geographically uneven and heavily dependent on institutional goodwill rather than enforceable accountability.
The scale of the problem is difficult to establish with precision owing to the symptom of under-reporting. A 2022 WICCI Council of Ethics survey spanning formal and informal workplaces found that over half of respondents had experienced unwanted physical advances at work, yet 55.2% of those affected chose not to file a complaint due to fear of retaliation or professional consequences. In the first half of year 2024, of the approxiamately 12,600 complaints received by the National Commission for Women only 493 were formally categorised as workplace sexual harassment. This figure likely understates the true incidence given how few survivors escalate complaints beyond the internal level.
The POSH Act mandates every organization with 10 or more employees to constitute an Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) and District Officers are required to form Local Complaints Committees(LCC) for women working in unorganized sectors or workplaces without ICC. However, continued non-compliance, absence of centralised monitoring and a general tendency of silence and suppression have rendered the Act unrealised.
Against this backdrop, the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MoWCD) launched the Sexual Harassment electronic Box or the SHe-Box in July 2017, as a web-based complaint portal for women employees in Central Government ministries and departments. The original portal allowed women to file complaints online and enabled real-time monitoring of complaint status by authorities. In 2018, the portal was extended to include private sector employees. However, the first version of SHe-Box was not without limitations; low public awareness, inadequate integration of ICCs and no mechanism to track whether the complaints were actually being resolved rather than just acknowledged.
In 2024, MoCWD, relaunched the portal as SHe-Box 2.0 as an effort to move towards a more standardised digital governance framework. The portal was presented as a national repository of Internal Committees (ICs) and Local Committees (LCs) to streamline complaint registration. It is explicitly framed as a broader “single-window” system meant to serve women across public and private sectors, organised or unorganised and even domestic work. This revamp signals how India is attempting to use digital infrastructure to address a classic implementation gap in legislation. The 2.0 version seeks to bridge that gap by combining complaint access, administrative data collection and oversight functions in one digital platform.
The new version does not replace the Internal Committees and Local Committees that the POSH Act empowers to investigate and adjudicate complaints, nor does it create a new statutory authority. Rather, it sits alongside that architecture as a digital layer performing three distinct functions simultaneously: a grievance interface, a compliance-monitoring registry that tracks whether mandated committees exist, and an accountability tool that makes non-compliance visible to oversight bodies including the judiciary.
Functioning
In this centralised platform, a complainant can submit a workplace sexual harassment complaint directly to the relevant IC or LC selected through the portal. According to the launch note, this direct routing was intended to reduce delays and human interference that occurred when complaints depended on informal forwarding chains or gatekeeping by administrators.
These three functions can be understood in three layers. First, it serves as a reporting interface where women can register complaints online and monitor the status of their cases. Second, it acts as a compliance registry by collecting data on workplaces, ICs, LCs, District Officers and nodal officers, making institutional arrangements more visible and easier to track. Third, it functions as a governance and awareness platform by hosting FAQs handbooks, training manuals, audio-visual materials relating to the POSH Act.
The contrast with the previous arrangement is sharp. Under the earlier mechanism, a woman generally had to know whether her employer had constituted an IC, identify its members and then navigate an internal process that could be opaque or intimidating. Women in the unorganised sector depended on the District-level Local Committees that were often difficult to identify in practice. The earlier SHe-Box description also gave little indication of a broad nationwide compliance dashboard and instead, it was framed as a complaints channel linked to central government offices.
SHe-Box 2.0, therefore, adds a digital coordination layer to the legal structure already created by the POSH Act. The portal becomes functional only when ministries, departments, states, Union Territories and private establishments upload and regularly update details of their respective committees. In that sense, the system is both a grievance platform and a live administrative database whose quality depends on continuous institutional participation.
The government also tried to widen access through digital integration. By 2026, the Ministry reported that the portal had been integrated with the Mission Shakti mobile application and made available on Android and iOS devices, while multilingual support had expanded to 23 languages. These features suggest an attempt to make digital access easier for women outside metropolitan, English-speaking and formal-sector workplaces, although actual use still depends on digital literacy, awareness and institutional responsiveness.
Performance
Available official data indicates that SHe-Box 2.0 has achieved visible administrative expansion in its first phase. In a Rajya Sabha reply issued in April 2026, the Ministry of Women and Child Development stated that more than 161,000 workplaces with over 10 employees had been onboarded to the portal by 27 March 2026. The same reply reported that more than 68,460 Internal Committees and 777 district-level Local Committees were listed on the portal.
Compared with the previous mechanism, where information on committees was decentralised and often inaccessible, SHe-Box 2.0 has started building a measurable national repository of workplace compliance structures. This is an important performance gain because one of the central weaknesses of PoSH implementation has long been the absence of reliable and publicly usable information about whether institutions had actually constituted the committees mandated by law.
A second performance indicator is the portal’s role in inter-governmental coordination. The Ministry reported engagement with bodies such as the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Ministry of Labour and Employment, Department of Financial Services, National Medical Commission, AICTE, Department of Higher Education and the National Legal Services Authority, along with industrial chambers, to expand compliance and private-sector participation.
A third marker is the portal’s linkage with judicial oversight. The government noted that Supreme Court orders in the Aureliano Fernandes case require Chief Secretaries, District Officers and Labour Commissioners to conduct surveys on the constitution of ICs and to ensure that the data is onboarded onto SHe-Box. This indicates that the portal is increasingly tied to compliance verification and court-monitored implementation.
That said, performance should be assessed cautiously. That number of onboarded workplaces or listed committees does not itself reveal whether complaints are resolved fairly, whether committees are functioning independently or whether women in precarious employment can access the system without retaliation.
Impact
The most significant impact of SHe-Box 2.0 lies in how it changes the state’s role in workplace sexual harassment redressal. The older model relied heavily on internal employer structures and district-level processes with limited central authority’s oversight except through periodic advisories or parliamentary scrutiny. The new portal introduces a more centralised and data-driven mode of governance in which the state can map institutions, monitor compliance and identify gaps across sectors and regions.
The portal has reduced procedural and informational barriers. Direct online submission, status monitoring, and a central repository of committees can lower dependence on informal institutional contacts and reduce the opacity that often discourages reporting. This is especially relevant in workplaces where women may be reluctant to approach senior management or where the existence of a valid Internal Committee is uncertain.
The portal may also have a wider normative impact on the compliance culture. Once committee details become part of a visible national system, constituting an IC is no longer just a legal formality but it becomes a digitally observable marker of institutional compliance. This could pressure employers and establishments to move toward more active documentation and periodic updating.
Its integration with the Mission Shakti mobile app and multilingual availability further broadens the idea of who can access workplace justice. Officially, the portal is intended to cover women across sectors, including those working in remote locations. Even so, the real impact for informal workers, domestic workers and women working in rural areas will depend on how effectively district officers, local committees and nodal officers support users beyond the digital interface itself.
Emerging Issues
The issues fall into two categories; some are inherent to the digital platform’s own design, while others are pre-existing weaknesses in POSH Act enforcement that the portal has inherited rather than solved. Distinguishing between them clarifies what SHe-Box 2.0 can realistically fix through iteration, and what requires institutional reform
The first issue is the gap between digital visibility and substantive justice. A portal can ensure that a complaint is logged and routed but it does not guarantee unbiased inquiry, witness protection, or freedom from workplace retaliation. If ICs and LCs are poorly trained, consisting of institutional hierarchies, or slow in functioning, digitising may improve record-keeping without improving the outcomes. This is fundamentally an implementation-level limitation and not a platform flaw. No interface design can substitute for trained, impartial committees, which remain the POSH Act’s unresolved weak link.
The second issue concerns uneven onboarding and data quality. The launch note itself made clear that the portal’s full functionality depends on ministries, states, Union Territories and private establishments updating their committee details. This means that the portal’s usefulness is contingent on bureaucratic compliance. This is a hybrid problem wherein the portal’s architecture correctly requires decentralised input but the underlying non-compliance is the same institutional inertia that has long undermined the POSH Act which is now simply more visible rather than resolved. If organisations fail to update data, if local committees remain unlisted, or if district-level records are incomplete, women may still face uncertainty despite the existence of the platform.
A third issue is inclusion. The SHe-Box 2.0 has expanded language support and app-based access but the digital interfaces can still exclude women with limited smartphone access, poor connectivity, low digital literacy, disability-related barriers or fear of creating written records on shared devices. For women in the unorganised sector, the portal’s promise depends heavily on whether the designated local authorities are active and functional at the grassroots level which lies outside the portal’s control.
A fourth issue relates to privacy and trust. The launch note emphasised confidentiality and secure handling of complainant’s information, which is essential in a domain shaped by stigma and power asymmetries. Yet centralised complaint platforms also raise difficult questions about data security, access control, record retention and the possibility that survivors may hesitate to use state-monitored systems if they are unsure how their information will circulate internally. Survivors’ hesitation to engage with state-monitored systems reflects a deeper trust deficit in grievance institutions generally.
Finally, there is a conceptual issue in treating digital governance as a substitute for institutional reform. Sexual harassment complaints are embedded in labour hierarchies, gender norms and organisational cultures. A digital platform can improve access and oversight, but it cannot by itself transform hostile workplace environments, reduce fear of retaliation, or build feminist sensitivity into inquiry processes.
The Way Forward
The first priority is to ensure completeness and reliability of the portal’s institutional database. All ministries, state departments, district authorities and private establishments covered by the POSH Act should be required to regularly update the details of ICs, LCs, district officers and nodal officers with periodic audits to verify whether the listed bodies are actually functional,
Second, digital reporting must be supplemented by stronger offline support. Women should be able to access help through facilitation seeks, district-level assistance, helplines, and civil-society referral networks, especially in areas where smartphone access is limited or where complaints need assistance in filling and following up cases. For informal-sector workers, the quality and accessibility of Local Committees will remain as important as the quality of the digital interface.
Third, the portal should evolve into a transparent but privacy-sensitive accountability system. Aggregate data onboarding, pendency, disposal times, and sector-wise compliance can be published regularly without exposing survivor identities, enabling researchers and policymakers to assess whether digitisation is improving redressal or documentation.
Fourth, training must be institutionalised. Since the ministry is already conducting meetings and hybrid training sessions, these should be expanded into regular mandatory capacity-building for ICs, LCs, employers and district officers on legal standards, trauma-informed handling, confidentiality and digital case management. Without such training, the portal risks becoming a technically improved system layered over weak inquiry institutions.
Finally, evaluation should move beyond launch metrics. Future assessment of SHe-Box 2.0 should examine whether the portal increases reporting by women in underrepresented sectors, reduces delays, improves procedural fairness, and strengthens trust in grievance redressal. Only then it can be judged as a meaningful digital-governance intervention rather than a technologically sophisticated compliance register.
SHe-Box 2.0 ultimately illustrates both the promise and the ceiling of digital governance as a tool for legal implementation. Where the POSH Act’s weakness has long been the unconstituted committees, undocumented non-compliance, and complaints that vanished into informal channels, a well designed digital interface can convert that opacity into something measurable and governable. This is not a trivial achievement in a legal system where enforcement gaps persist because they are undocumented. But the case also demonstrates the limits of this approach, that is, a platform can compel visibility but not institutional will. The quality of an inquiry, the independence of a committee, the willingness of a colleague to testify, and a survivor’s confidence that reporting will not cost her career, these outcomes are not shaped by an interface.
Digital governance, in other words, is best understood not as a substitute for the harder work of institutional reform, but as an accountability infrastructure that makes the absence of that reform harder to hide. Whether SHe-Box 2.0 succeeds will depend less on its technical evolution than on whether the visibility it creates is met with sustained political and administrative will to act on what it reveals.
References
Government of India. (2005, November 10). Important Services. National Portal of India. https://www.india.gov.in/services
Government of India. (2024, September 2). Union Minister Launches SHe-Box Portal. Press Information Bureau. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressNoteDetails.aspx?NoteId=152076&ModuleId=3®=3&lang=1
Government of India. (2026, April 1). Press Release Page | Press Information Bureau. Press Release Page | Press Information Bureau. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2247562®=3&lang=1
Ministry of Women and Child Development. (2024, July 24). SHe-Box Official Portal. About SHe-Box. https://shebox.wcd.gov.in/about
Press Bureau of India. (2026, April 1). Sexual Harassment Electronic Box (SHe-Box) Portal — a digital governance initiative for effective implementation of Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013. Press Bureau of India. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2247562®=48&lang=2
About the Contributor
Samiksha Muskan is a Research and Editorial Intern at IMPRI. She is currently pursuing a BA (Honors) with Research in Political Science from Lady Shri Ram College for Women at Delhi University.
Disclaimer
All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.
Acknowledgement
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to IMPRI for giving me this opportunity to write Policy Update and its intellectual encouraging environment. I would especially like to acknowledge Shivani Chauhan and Pallavi for giving valuable feedback and review.
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