Harassment can cost you a job

Women may soon have law on their side when it comes to sexual harassment in the workplace. In fact, the proposed law intends to cover the rights of women even in places like hospitals, prisons, courts, parliament and assemblies.

Published on: Jan 14, 2006, 04:40:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

Women may soon have law on their side when it comes to sexual harassment in the workplace. In fact, the proposed law intends to cover the rights of women even in places like hospitals, prisons, courts, parliament and assemblies.

For those who indulge in it, especially government servants, it could mean curtailment of service, a red mark in the career record and even imprisonment.

In a new initiative of the human resource development ministry’s department for women and child development, the national commission for women (NCW) has now been asked to draft a bill for protecting the rights of the working women.

This comes in the wake of the ministry’s decision to reject a draft of the law prepared by Lawyers’ Collective Women Rights Initiative. “Though the bill drafted by lawyers’ initiative was a comprehensive document, we found that it didn’t speak on the punishment and a definite time frame to settle a complaint of sexual harassment. So, we decided to entrust the job to NCW,” said a ministry official.

The government wants both rights of a woman and what tantamount to sexual harassment to be clearly defined under law. It also wants to lay down what action is to be taken against an employer for not constituting a sexual harassment complaint committee and for timely hearing of a case. NCW, on its part, will be holding discussions with different women bodies to reach a consensus.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

Check India news real-time updates, latest news on Hindustan Times and more across India.