When a Properly Constituted Internal Committee Isn't Optional: Getting IC Composition Right

Many organisations treat the Internal Committee as a checkbox - appoint a few people, file the names somewhere, move on. The Supreme Court's own language in the Aureliano Fernandes proceedings - that the POSH Act "can only be effective if implemented with sincerity and care" - is a pointed reminder that this approach misses the point of the statute. Composition isn't a formality; it's the mechanism the Act relies on to make an inquiry fair in the first place.

What the statute actually requires

Section 4(2) of the POSH Act sets out a specific structure for the Internal Committee, and it is genuinely specific, not a loose guideline. The Committee needs a minimum of four members: a Presiding Officer who must be a senior woman employee (if no sufficiently senior woman is available at that particular office, the employer may nominate one from another office or administrative unit of the same organisation); at least two other members from among employees committed to the cause of women or with relevant experience; and, critically, at least one external member from an NGO or association committed to the cause of women, or someone otherwise familiar with sexual harassment issues - often a lawyer. Across the whole Committee, at least half the members must be women.

Each member's term runs for a maximum of three years, and the external member is entitled to a fee or allowance for participating in proceedings, on terms the employer prescribes.

Where this actually goes wrong in practice

The most common failure isn't a dramatic one - it's an outdated Committee. A three-year term limit means an IC formed once and never revisited will, at some point, simply lapse in its authority to function, even if the same people are still notionally "the Committee" on paper. Organisations that treat IC formation as a one-time task rather than a standing governance obligation are the most likely to discover this gap only when a complaint actually arrives.

The second common failure is structural: appointing an IC without the mandatory external member, or without a woman as Presiding Officer, often because the organisation genuinely didn't have a senior woman available and didn't realise the Act provides a specific mechanism (nomination from another office) for exactly that situation rather than simply proceeding without one.

The third, and the one multi-location employers miss most often, is scope. A single Committee at a company's head office does not automatically have jurisdiction over a branch office in a different city - each workplace with ten or more employees needs its own properly constituted Committee, unless the organisation has deliberately and correctly structured a shared arrangement that satisfies the Act's requirements for each location.

Why "we have an IC" isn't the same as "we have a compliant IC"

It's worth being precise about what courts have and haven't said on this exact point. The Aureliano Fernandes case itself did not turn on composition - the appellant's specific challenge to his Committee's makeup (that its members were junior to him) was not upheld; the case turned on the fairness of the inquiry process itself, particularly the ex parte handling of his absence. That's a useful distinction, not a reason for complacency: the statute's composition requirements are separately, independently mandatory regardless of how any particular case was decided on its own facts. An employer whose IC doesn't meet the Section 4(2) structure isn't protected by the fact that one specific composition challenge failed in one specific case on its own facts.

What a genuine audit looks like

Confirming IC compliance isn't a five-minute exercise. It means checking, for every qualifying location: is there a Presiding Officer, is she a woman, is she sufficiently senior (or properly nominated from elsewhere if not); is there a genuine external member, and is that person still active and available; does the Committee overall meet the 50% women threshold; and has any member's three-year term quietly expired without a formal reconstitution. It also means confirming the Committee's composition and contact details are conspicuously displayed at the workplace, as Section 19 separately requires.

The takeaway

A Committee that technically exists on an old organisational chart is not the same thing as a Committee that would survive scrutiny today. Given how directly the Supreme Court has tied POSH's effectiveness to how seriously it's actually implemented, an IC audit is one of the highest-value, lowest-cost compliance exercises an organisation can run - and it's worth doing before a complaint forces the question, not after.