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Governance Breakdown is a SpaceUpp series examining landmark cases in workplace governance — not as legal summaries, but as business lessons every Indian employer needs to understand.

What Happened

In 1992, Bhanwari Devi — a grassroots social worker employed by the Rajasthan government — was gang-raped by men from her village after she attempted to prevent a child marriage. The accused were acquitted. The case exposed not just a failure of the criminal justice system but the complete absence of any dedicated legal framework to address sexual harassment of women at work.

A group of women's rights organisations filed a Public Interest Litigation before the Supreme Court of India. They asked for one thing: that the Court establish guidelines to protect women from sexual harassment in the workplace until Parliament enacted a law.

The Supreme Court delivered its judgment in 1997. It is known as the Vishaka judgment.

What the Supreme Court Said

The Court held that sexual harassment at the workplace violates a woman's fundamental rights to equality, to life, and to practise any profession — rights guaranteed under Articles 14, 15, 19, and 21 of the Constitution.

In doing so, Vishaka transformed workplace sexual harassment from a private grievance into a constitutional rights issue, making workplace safety inseparable from equality and dignity. That framing — harassment as a constitutional violation, not merely a disciplinary matter — is what gave the judgment its lasting authority.

In the absence of legislation, the Court issued binding guidelines — the Vishaka Guidelines — that every employer was required to follow immediately. Those guidelines required employers to:

●       Prohibit sexual harassment at the workplace and express that prohibition in a written policy

●       Establish a complaints mechanism — a committee with third-party participation — to receive and resolve complaints

●       Conduct awareness programmes so employees understood their rights and the complaint process

●       Take disciplinary action against perpetrators

These were not recommendations. The Supreme Court made them enforceable obligations with the force of law until Parliament enacted legislation.

What It Changed

The Vishaka judgment did something that no prior framework had done: it placed the burden of preventing and addressing workplace sexual harassment directly on the employer.

Before Vishaka, India had no dedicated legal framework governing workplace sexual harassment. Complaints were often addressed inconsistently through criminal law or internal disciplinary processes, leaving significant gaps in protection. After Vishaka, it became an organisational governance obligation. The employer was responsible — not just for their own conduct, but for the environment they created and the systems they built or failed to build.

Every Indian employer became legally responsible for creating mechanisms to prevent and address workplace sexual harassment in 1997 — sixteen years before the PoSH Act codified those obligations into statute in 2013.

Every PoSH obligation an Indian employer carries today — the ICC, the policy, the training, the annual report — traces directly back to what the Supreme Court required in 1997. Vishaka is not history. It is the foundation.

What Employers Still Get Wrong

Twenty-eight years after the Vishaka judgment and twelve years after the PoSH Act, the gaps the Court identified in 1997 are still present in Indian workplaces.

The complaints mechanism exists on paper but is not functional. The external member requirement envisioned by the guidelines is treated as a formality rather than as a mechanism for independent oversight. Awareness programmes are conducted once, at onboarding, and not repeated. The policy is drafted but not communicated.

The Supreme Court in the 2023 Aureliano Fernandes judgment said this explicitly — that widespread non-compliance across Indian institutions remained a systemic failure, not a series of individual oversights. The Court directed governments and employers to strengthen implementation twenty-six years after Vishaka first required it.

That gap — between what the law has required since 1997 and what most organisations have actually built — is the governance failure that compounds silently until a complaint makes it visible.

The Governance Lesson

The Vishaka judgment established one principle that has not changed in twenty-eight years: the responsibility to prevent and address workplace sexual harassment belongs to the employer, not to the employee who experiences it.

An organisation that has not built a functioning system — regardless of size, sector, or stage — is not in a grey area. It is carrying a liability that the Supreme Court of India defined as a constitutional violation more than two decades ago.

The question is not whether the obligation exists. It has existed since 1997. The question is whether the organisation has met it.

Assess the Governance Position

SpaceUpp works with Indian organisations to build workplace governance systems that meet the standard the law has required since Vishaka — and that function in practice, not just on paper.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What was the Vishaka judgment? The Vishaka judgment was a 1997 Supreme Court of India ruling that established binding guidelines for preventing and addressing sexual harassment of women at the workplace. It was delivered in response to a PIL filed following the gang-rape of Bhanwari Devi, a government-employed social worker in Rajasthan.

Why was the Vishaka judgment important? It was the first time the Supreme Court established that workplace sexual harassment violates a woman's fundamental constitutional rights — to equality, dignity, and the right to practise a profession. It made employer accountability a constitutional obligation, not just a disciplinary matter.

What were the Vishaka Guidelines? Binding directives issued by the Supreme Court requiring employers to prohibit sexual harassment through a written policy, establish a complaints committee with third-party participation, conduct employee awareness programmes, and take disciplinary action against perpetrators.

How is Vishaka connected to the PoSH Act? The PoSH Act of 2013 codified and expanded the principles the Vishaka judgment established in 1997. The Act did not create a new framework — it gave statutory form to obligations that had been constitutionally binding for sixteen years.

Is the Vishaka judgment still relevant today? Yes. The constitutional principles it established remain the foundation of every PoSH obligation in India. The 2023 Supreme Court judgment in Aureliano Fernandes explicitly referenced systemic non-compliance with obligations that trace back to Vishaka — confirming its continued relevance and authority.