The true embodiment of Justice Delayed, Justice Denied: Limitation under POSH Act

The impetus for this piece is personal. Having recently navigated the internal sexual harassment redressal mechanism under the POSH Act within my university, I came away with a troubling realisation that the statute, heralded as a landmark when it was enacted in 2013, is quietly failing the women it was designed to protect.

The failure is the slow procedural suffocation i.e. a six-month outer time limit to file a written complaint under POSH Act, which has been further tightened by SCI in Vineeta Patnaik v. Nirmal Kanti Chakrabarti & Ors.

Section 9 of the POSH Act requires an aggrieved woman to file a written complaint with the Internal or Local Committee (IC or LC) within 3 months from the date of the incident, or in cases of a series of incidents, within 3 months from the date of the last incident. The first proviso to Section 9(1) extends this limit by a further 3 months if the IC or LC is satisfied, for reasons recorded in writing.

However, this timeline is fundamentally deficient in how it understands the real life implications of sexual harassment, the social hierarchy and even international standards.

Psychology of trauma is irreconcilable with a three-month window

Studies on sexual violence reporting patterns show that a majority of survivors do not make formal disclosures in the period immediately following an incident, with many choosing to come forward weeks, months, or even years later due to psychological phenomena such as acute trauma, PTSD, shame, self-blame and a rational fear of negative consequences. 

The US Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Center for PTSD has recorded that approximately 45% of women who experience rape meet the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, a condition whose avoidance symptoms specifically compel survivors away from formal engagement with the people and processes connected to their trauma. Research also indicates that over 60% of women do not recognise their experience as fitting legal definitions of assault at the time it occurs, further delaying the moment when formal complaint becomes conceivable. Thus, the 3-month timeline proves to be insufficient for a majority of aggrieved women.

Furthermore, even the proviso for a further 3-month window to file a complaint does not cure this problem since it is purely discretionary and conditioned entirely on the IC’s or LC’s subjective opinion.

Although the Act provides for the mandatory constitution of the IC, in practice, IC composition is routinely sub-standard. Reports have even documented an employer reconstituting the IC during a pending inquiry to secure a more favourable outcome. Where the respondent occupies a senior position, as is the case in the overwhelming majority of workplace harassment cases, the structural pressures on IC members are severe. The Delhi High Court has observed that an IC comprised of members from the same department or unit as the respondent creates reasonable apprehension of bias. In short, the proviso places the complainant at the mercy of an institution that may itself be compromised.

Additionally, the proviso only extends the deadline for filing the written complaint. It does not toll the running of the limitation period during any informal complaint, conciliation attempt, or preliminary administrative process.

Power asymmetry

The POSH Act was conceived specifically in response to hierarchical workplace dynamics. Yet, the 3-month window is structurally blind to the coercive power relationships that determine when a complainant feels safe enough to act. In most documented POSH complaints, the respondent occupies a position of authority over the complainant. This is further compounded in university settings, where junior faculty, research scholars and students (even minors) may co-reside with or remain academically dependent on the respondent for years.

Furthermore, a dimension of the 6-month ceiling that has received almost no scholarly or judicial attention is its application in educational institutions where minors may be present as students. A minor who experiences sexual harassment within the institutional context may face the 6-month ceiling before she has acquired the institutional knowledge or emotional support to pursue a formal complaint. The Act provides no special dispensation for minors or teenagers. The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, which does provide more protective limitation rules, does not apply to the workplace IC mechanism. This jurisdictional gap is one of the most under-examined structural flaws in India’s anti-harassment framework.

International comparisons

The Indian framework is a global outlier in its restrictiveness. In the United States, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act requires complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to be filed within 180 days of the last discriminatory act, or within 300 days in states that have their own anti-discrimination laws and agencies. In Canada, the response has been far more radical. The Province of Alberta eliminated the limitation period for civil claims arising from sexual misconduct entirely, through Bill 2 (An Act to Remove Barriers for Survivors of Sexual and Domestic Violence), in 2017. Ontario followed a similar approach for sexual assault claims under Bill 132 (2016), removing the 2-year civil limitation period. Canadian courts have further held that where sexual harassment constitutes a continuing course of conduct, the limitation period does not begin until the employee’s final day of employment. In the United Kingdom, there is no statutory limitation period for the criminal prosecution of sexual offences. In civil proceedings, a 3-year extendable limitation period applies, with broad judicial discretion to extend it in the interests of justice.

Against this comparative backdrop, India’s 6-month absolute ceiling is extremely restrictive.

The complainant in this case filed a sexual harassment complaint against NUJS Vice-Chancellor Chakrabarti in December 2023, roughly 8 months after the last alleged act in April 2023. The LCC dismissed it as time-barred under Section 9. After conflicting High Court rulings, the Supreme Court upheld the dismissal on September 12, 2025.

The apex court's most legally contestable challenge in the case was the parallel drawn between Order VII Rule 11 of the Code of Civil Procedure (CPC) and Section 9 of the POSH Act. The Court held that LCs and ICs may apply the same logic to reject time-barred POSH complaints without a full inquiry.

This analogy is fundamentally misconceived. The CPC is a statute of procedure governing civil suits between private parties before ordinary civil courts wherein the procedure is adversarial in nature and where parties are presumed to be of roughly equal procedural capacity, represented by legal counsel, and subject to the full range of equitable doctrines developed by courts over centuries. The POSH Act, by contrast, is a protective welfare legislation enacted to redress a structural power imbalance.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasised that welfare statutes must be interpreted purposively and liberally in favour of the beneficiary class. The Court’s own jurisprudence on the interpretation of social welfare legislation from labour law to consumer protection consistently holds that procedural bars should not be read in ways that defeat the statute’s protective purpose.

The equation of a POSH complainant with a civil plaintiff invoking the CPC inverts the legislative intent of POSH Act. The Vishaka guidelines, from which the POSH Act emerged, were themselves a response to the gap in India’s protective framework for women in the workplace. Importing the rigour of CPC threshold dismissals into this framework subordinates substantive justice to procedural formalism in precisely the domain where the legislature most clearly intended otherwise.

India’s legal system provides several overlapping mechanisms for addressing conduct that may constitute workplace sexual harassment such as Section 75 and Section 354 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), which criminalise sexual harassment and has a limitation period of 3 years as per Section 514 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), substantially more generous than POSH’s 6 months. Most importantly, where the complainant is a minor, the POSCO Act provides a framework for reporting which has no fixed limitation period. Moreover, the Sexual Harassment electronic box (SHe-Box) Portal offers an online complaint mechanism to allow women employees in both governmental and private sector to file complaints directly. 

However, these alternatives require engaging the police, who are widely documented to be hostile to women complainants, who are then prone to secondary victimisation and in which conviction rates remain dismally low. The psychosocial barriers to criminal reporting are, if anything, higher than those to internal IC complaints.

Most fundamentally, none of these alternatives replicate what the POSH Act was specifically designed to provide: a confidential, workplace-specific, low-threshold and expert forum for the adjudication of sexual harassment complaints. The POSH Act is a testament to the legislature’s recognition that women in the workplace deserve a dedicated, specialised mechanism for seeking justice but without a reformed limitation period, it operates as the shell of that promise.

Vanshika Gupta is a third-year law student of National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore.