Over half of Sensex firms disclose sexual harassment cases

More than half of the 30 Sensex companies, including Wipro and ICICI Bank, have disclosed cases of sexual harassment of women at workplace for the last financial year, but a majority of the complaints got resolved.
Some cases at a few companies were yet to be resolved at the end of the financial year 2014-15, the companies have said in the first such disclosures in their latest annual reports.
According to an analysis of the details disclosed by the companies in their respective annual reports, 18 Sensex companies received at least 370 complaints together pertaining to sexual harassment of women at workplace during 2014-15.

Ten other companies said there were no such complaints and these included Reliance Industries, Maruti Suzuki, Hero Motocorp, HDFC, Lupin, Larsen & Toubro, Bajaj Auto, GAIL, Coal India and ONGC.
The details were not available for two companies -- TCS and Sun Pharma.
Among the 18 companies that disclosed having received such complaints, HDFC Bank said all the cases were resolved successfully although it did not reveal their numbers.

The 17 companies that disclosed the numbers included Wipro (100 complaints), ICICI Bank (94), Infosys (53), Axis Bank (34), Tata Steel (24), Cipla (17) and State Bank of India (14).
These details have been disclosed by the companies under the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2014.

Other companies that disclosed such complaints included Bharti Airtel, Tata Motors, BHEL, Dr Reddy's Laboratories, Hindalco Industries, ITC, NTPC, Mahindra & Mahindra, Vedanta and Hindustan Unilever.
All these companies said they have a policy against sexual harassment and a formal process for dealing with complaints of harassment or discrimination.
In addition, many of these firms organise workshops or awareness programme against sexual harassment.
The maximum number of complaints have been reported in information technology and banking sectors, which also happen to have relatively higher proportions of women in their workforce compared to the other industries.
This is the first instance that the companies have made disclosure about sexual harassment cases.

In its annual report, Wipro said, "A total of 100 complaints of sexual harassment was raised through Ombuds, of which 92 cases were substantiated and appropriate actions were taken in all cases.