Even as Cuttack is the judicial hub of the State for housing the High Court and several other courts and tribunals, many institutions here having more than 10 employees are surprisingly not sensitive to women workforce as per law.
About 30 per cent heads of offices both in organised and unorganised sectors here are not aware of the Visakha Guidelines-1997 of the Supreme Court or the subsequent Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplaces (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act of 2013.
Among them who were aware of such laws, only 32 per cent have formed the mandatory Internal Complaint Committees (ICCs) in their offices to look into the complaints of sexual harassment of women employees.
These upsetting statistics are shown in a survey conducted in about a hundred institutions in the city by reputed social organisation Project Swarajya to study the position of women employees and the status of complaint committees. In further revelation, Project Swarajya secretary Dolly Dash informed that many offices even headed by women employees are neither aware of existence of such laws nor have taken the mandatory step to form the ICCs in their offices.
“lack of legal consciousness and not properly understanding the laws which protect them, the women workforce in our society are suffering a lot,” Dash said, adding that due to absence of favourable workplaces, women’s productivity is not encouraging in our country.
Out of the 24 institutions, which have formed ICCs in the city, only four have registered sexual harassment cases over these years and investigated into all of them. These four institutions among themselves have registered as many as 26 cases, of which 23 have been settled amicably while the remaining three turned police incidents. Interestingly, of the 68 per cent of the institutions which have not formed ICCs, a whopping 45 per cent said they were not aware of it and 30 per cent are callous towards it.
Six per cent said they have not formed ICCs because they do not have any women employees and eight per cent said it has not been necessitated as there has not been any such complaint yet.