Sexual harassment cases in top cos spike

livemint.com:

MUMBAI : India’s top publicly traded companies saw a 70% surge in sexual harassment complaints during FY23 from the previous year, a Mint analysis of data from their annual reports showed. While the rise in cases highlights a worrying trend, it also suggests increased awareness about sexual harassment and the availability of platforms to report complaints.

“It would be a mistake to assume that sexual harassment cases did not occur before this, but earlier, one wasn’t even sure what constituted sexual harassment and what remedies were available to a victim," said Aparna Mittal, the founder of Samāna Centre for Gender, Policy and Law. Data compiled by Mint showed that 755 cases were registered in FY23 at 23 of the 30 Sensex companies that have released their annual reports.

This set of 23 companies had reported 451 such cases in FY22. Even after the remaining seven companies release their annual reports, the total count will remain markedly higher than in FY22 when all Sensex companies together reported 475 cases (this excludes Nestlé India, which follows January to December cycle.) IT firms and banks, which have large headcounts, typically register the largest number of sexual harassment cases.

In FY23, the highest number of sexual harassment complaints were registered at Wipro Ltd (141), Infosys Ltd (78), Tech Mahindra Ltd (74), HDFC Bank Ltd (68), HCL Technologies Ltd (55), Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd (55), Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (49), State Bank of India (46), Tata Steel Ltd (38), and Axis Bank Ltd (34). All these firms saw an increase from the previous year.