Dr Sohail Malik v. Union of India (2025): a woman may complain to her own ICC even if the harasser works elsewhere

When a senior civil servant is alleged to have harassed a woman who works in an entirely different government department, which Internal Complaints Committee inquires into the complaint — hers, or his? In Dr Sohail Malik v. Union of India, decided on 10 December 2025, the Supreme Court answered that the committee at the aggrieved woman's own workplace is competent, and that the words "where the respondent is an employee" in Section 11 of the POSH Act do not confine jurisdiction to the respondent's employer. The decision substantially widens the practical reach of the statute, with consequences extending well beyond the inter-departmental facts before the Court.

The facts in brief

The appellant, Dr Sohail Malik, was a 2010-batch IRS officer posted as an Officer on Special Duty (Investigation) in the Central Board of Direct Taxes in Delhi. The complainant was a 2004-batch IAS officer working as a Joint Secretary in the Department of Food and Public Distribution. She alleged that on 15 May 2023 the appellant sexually harassed her at her office in Krishi Bhawan, New Delhi. She lodged a complaint, and the Internal Complaints Committee constituted at her own workplace took up the matter.

The appellant resisted the inquiry on a jurisdictional ground. He argued that because he was an employee of a different establishment — the CBDT, not the complainant's department — the committee at her workplace had no authority to inquire into a complaint against him. On his reading of Section 11, the inquiry could only be conducted by the committee of the establishment where the respondent was employed. The High Court rejected that contention, and the matter reached the Supreme Court.

The question

Section 11(1) of the POSH Act provides that the Internal Committee (or the Local Committee) shall proceed to make inquiry into a complaint "in accordance with the provisions of the service rules applicable to the respondent and where no such rules exist, in such manner as may be prescribed." The text opens with the phrase "where the respondent is an employee." The narrow question was whether that phrase fixes jurisdiction on the committee of the respondent's workplace, so that a complainant must pursue her remedy before the committee of the establishment that employs the man she accuses.

Put differently: is "where the respondent is an employee" a clause of place — confining the inquiry to the respondent's establishment — or a clause of condition, identifying merely which body of service rules the committee must apply once it inquires?

What the Court held

The Court dismissed the appeal and held that the committee at the aggrieved woman's workplace is the competent forum. It read the opening words of Section 11 as a conditional, not a geographical or organisational, expression — "where" in the sense of "in case" or "if" the respondent happens to be an employee, as distinct from situations covered elsewhere by the Act. So read, the phrase performs a single, limited function: it directs the committee to conduct its inquiry in accordance with the service rules applicable to the respondent. It says nothing about which committee may take cognisance of the complaint in the first place.

The Court anchored this construction in the Act's expansive definition of "workplace" under Section 2(o) and in its remedial, victim-centred purpose. A restrictive reading, it held, would defeat the statutory scheme by forcing a complainant to carry her grievance to an unfamiliar establishment in which she has no standing — an outcome the Act was never intended to produce.

Building on that concern, the Court explained that to require a woman to approach the committee of an "alien workplace" would compound the very difficulty the legislation was designed to relieve. It distinguished two stages that the appellant's argument had run together. The committee at the complainant's workplace conducts the preliminary, fact-finding inquiry and submits its report. If that report leads to disciplinary action, the formal disciplinary proceeding against the respondent is then governed by the service rules of his own department — in this instance the Central Civil Services (Classification, Control and Appeal) Rules, 1965. The reference to "service rules applicable to the respondent" in Section 11, the Court observed, is itself proof that the respondent need not be an employee of the same workplace as the complainant; the statute plainly contemplates that the two may belong to different establishments.

Analysis

The decision turns on a clean point of statutory construction, but its doctrinal significance lies in how it locates Section 11 within the architecture of the Act. The POSH Act is built on a wide notion of "workplace" and an "aggrieved woman" who need not be an employee of the establishment at all. Reading Section 11 to confine jurisdiction to the respondent's employer would sit awkwardly with that design, because it would make the forum depend on the accused's place of work rather than on where the harm to the woman occurred or where she is situated. By treating "where the respondent is an employee" as a conditional clause that selects the applicable inquiry procedure, the Court keeps Section 11 consistent with the gateway provisions that define who may complain and where harassment is actionable.

The two-stage framework the Court articulated — preliminary inquiry by the complainant's committee, formal disciplinary action under the respondent's service rules — is the structural key. It dissolves the apparent tension the appellant relied on. There is no double jurisdiction and no conflict: the committee that inquires and the authority that disciplines can sit in different establishments without difficulty, because they perform different functions at different points in the process. This reading also coheres with the line of authority, running from Aureliano Fernandes v. State of Goa, that insists on giving the Act real effect rather than allowing procedural objections to hollow out its protections.

The judgment also clarifies, by negative implication, the boundaries of the rule. The Court was concerned with where the respondent is employed, not with whether the underlying complaint discloses a "workplace" nexus at all. That threshold question — whether the alleged conduct occurred in a setting the Act recognises as a workplace — remains a live one, as the contrasting outcome in Siddhesh Satpute v. SBI illustrates. Sohail Malik widens who can be proceeded against and before which committee; it does not dispense with the requirement that the incident be connected to a workplace in the statutory sense.

Why it matters

For practitioners advising employers, the most important takeaway is that an organisation's Internal Complaints Committee can be required to inquire into conduct by persons who are not its own employees — respondents drawn from other departments, and, on the logic of the ruling, from outside the organisation altogether, including clients, vendors, consultants and contractors who interact with the complainant at her workplace. Committees can no longer decline a complaint simply because the man named is "not our employee." The ruling effectively tells organisations to be ready to investigate third-party and inter-departmental respondents.

For complainants, the decision removes a real and dispiriting obstacle. A woman need not navigate an unfamiliar establishment, where she has no colleagues and no standing, to be heard. She may approach the committee she knows — her own. That is precisely the accessibility the Court identified as central to the Act's purpose.

The practical sequencing the Court endorsed should guide committees going forward: conduct the preliminary inquiry, prepare the report, and route any disciplinary consequence to the respondent's employer to be actioned under the service rules that bind him. Employers in the private sector, in particular, should revisit their POSH policies and committee mandates to ensure that complaints against outsiders and cross-entity respondents are accepted and processed rather than turned away on a jurisdictional pretext that the Supreme Court has now closed off.

Related on Valkya

• Siddhesh Satpute v. SBI: a shared auto is not a workplace under the POSH Act
• Aureliano Fernandes v. State of Goa: enforcing the POSH Act's machinery
• Dr Soma Mandal Debnath v. Tanmoy Debnath: workplace humiliation and Section 13(1)(ia) HMA

Sources

• Verdictum, "ICC Has Jurisdiction Under POSH Act Over Employee Of Different Workplace Where Aggrieved Woman Isn't Working: Supreme Court"
• SCC Online Blog, "Aggrieved Woman's Workplace ICC can Investigate Respondents from Other Departments: Supreme Court's Landmark POSH Act Ruling Explained"