The practitioner reading list and how to keep up

You will be asked, at some point, what to read. Here is the working answer.

Primary sources you must own

1. The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013. Act No. 14 of 2013. Available on the India Code repository at indiacode.nic.in. Print a copy, mark it up, and keep it next to you.
2. The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Rules, 2013. Notified by the Ministry of Women and Child Development on the 9th of December, 2013. The Rules are short. Read all of them. Rule 7 alone will save you procedural mistakes.
3. Aureliano Fernandes v. State of Goa. Supreme Court, 12 May 2023. Civil Appeal No. 2482 of 2014. Read paragraphs containing the operative directions in full [L5-C1].
4. Vaneeta Patnaik v. Nirmal Kanti Chakrabarti. Supreme Court, 12 September 2025. 2025 INSC 1106. Read the limitation and Direct Nexus Test holdings [L5-C2].
5. Dr. Sohail Malik v. Union of India. Supreme Court, 10 December 2025. 2025 INSC 1415. Read the jurisdiction holding and the workplace re-statement [L5-C3].
6. The Companies (Accounts) Second Amendment Rules, 2025. Effective 14 July 2025. Read the amended Rule 8 of the Companies (Accounts) Rules, 2014, especially the POSH disclosure clause [L5-C4].

Secondary sources you should know about

• The Government of India Handbook on Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace issued by the Ministry of Women and Child Development. Useful templates and pro-forma. Read it once. It is not the law, but it shows the Government's reading of the law.
• The Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan judgment (Supreme Court, 13 August 1997). Superseded by the Act, but read it once to understand where the IC composition rules came from.
• Apparel Export Promotion Council v. A. K. Chopra (Supreme Court, 20 January 1999). Useful on the definition of sexual harassment, especially attempts at unwanted physical contact.
• Medha Kotwal Lele v. Union of India (Supreme Court, 19 October 2012). The bridging judgment between Vishaka and the Act.

How to keep up

The Act is now a live area. Three things keep you current.

1. A Supreme Court tracker. Subscribe to LiveLaw, Bar and Bench, or SCC Online's case alerts for POSH. At least one new ruling per quarter is the recent baseline.
2. The Ministry of Women and Child Development portal and the SHe-Box online complaint platform. The SHe-Box was relaunched by MWCD in 2024 and continues to evolve. Practitioners need to know how it interfaces with employer ICs.
3. Your own log of inquiries. Every inquiry you sit on teaches you something. Keep a sanitised log of procedural decisions you made and would make differently next time. After ten inquiries, that log is more useful than any textbook.

End of Module 1

You have covered: the origin and dates of the Act, the relationship between the Act and the Rules, the structural map, the three rulings that have rewritten parts of the law, and the practitioner reading list.

From Module 2 onwards, we leave the framework and go into the working substance. Module 2 starts with the most contested question in POSH practice: what is and is not sexual harassment under Section 2(n) and Section 3.

The 2026 addition to the reading list

Four documents have been added to the practitioner's stack in the last twelve months. If your reading list is still the six-item list from 2024, you are current on the Act but stale on the operating environment.

1. The Companies (Accounts) Second Amendment Rules, 2025. Notified by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, effective 14 July 2025. Expanded POSH disclosure in the Director's Report. Read the amended Rule 8. This is the reason your general counsel is now asking the IC for granular case-status numbers, not just totals.
2. The DPDP Rules, 2025. Gazetted 13 November 2025 (G.S.R. 846(E)). Phased commencement: 14 November 2025 for Rule-making powers and Data Protection Board sections; 13 November 2026 for main compliance framework including notice, consent, retention and breach; 13 May 2027 for cross-border data transfer rules. Every IC now handles Data Fiduciary duties over complaint records. Rules 3, 6, 8, 12 are the ones you actually touch.
3. The SHe-Box 2.0 platform at shebox.wcd.gov.in, relaunched 17 June 2026 by MWCD. Familiarise yourself with the complainant journey and the IC-facing back-office. Your intake procedure has to accept SHe-Box-originated complaints.
4. The Nomination and Remuneration Committee's POSH governance charter, if you are inside a listed or covered company. Increasingly, boards are mandating that the IC formally reports to the NRC (or the CSR Committee for CSR-covered companies) at least once a quarter. That reporting cadence should be in your IC calendar.

The IC member's quarterly self-check

A short checklist to run every quarter:

• Are all five of my primary sources current? Any statutory amendment or new Supreme Court ruling in the last quarter?
• Have I refreshed my working knowledge of Rule 7 procedure in the last six months?
• Is the IC's contact page on the intranet updated? Are all members reachable at the listed contacts?
• Has my organisation completed the annual training under Aureliano Fernandes for this year?
• Did we file the Section 21 annual report? Is a copy on file with the District Officer?
• Are the Section 22 disclosure numbers in the Director's Report consistent with our inquiry log?

Six questions. Ten minutes a quarter. That is the discipline that separates the working POSH practitioner from the one who realises during an inquiry that the composition is defective, the policy is stale, or the annual report is unsigned.

The MWCD SHe-Box 2.0 practitioner interface

Every serious POSH practitioner in 2026 has an MWCD SHe-Box 2.0 login for each employer they support. The portal is at shebox.wcd.gov.in. On first login, the practitioner: (a) registers the employer\'s workplace with the correct name, PAN, GSTIN, address, headcount, and IC contact details, (b) uploads the IC constitution order and current member list, (c) configures the automated notification channel to route complaints to the IC-dedicated email (never a shared HR alias), (d) tests the end-to-end complaint routing via the sandbox mode. Post-registration, the practitioner logs in monthly to review portal-flagged complaints, respond within the specified window, and update workplace metadata as it changes. Failure to register or maintain the portal profile is a fresh Section 26 exposure post the 12 August 2025 SC directions.

The dcomply POSH practitioner track: how this course fits your career

This course sits inside a broader dcomply Academy track for POSH practitioners. Related courses include POSH Lead Practitioner (advanced course focused on running IC inquiries end-to-end with 60 lessons and case studies), POSH Advocate Practice (for lawyers representing complainants and respondents), and specific workshops on the 2025 Kerala HC line on the POSH-labour law boundary. Practitioners who complete the base POSH Practitioner course frequently follow up with the Lead Practitioner course within 6-12 months as their case volume grows. For lawyers, the Advocate Practice track lives on the parallel academy.vakeelsaathi.com platform.

Test-your-understanding: five practitioner questions

Before moving to Module 2, check your grasp of Module 1 with five self-test questions. Answers in Module 2 opening. (1) What are the two limbs of the Section 2(g) employer definition, and which applies to a WeWork tenant? (2) What is the seven-task Aureliano compliance pack, and how does it help an employer facing a Section 25 inspection? (3) Under the Vaneeta Patnaik Direct Nexus Test, does an appraisal cut two years after a sexual advance count as a continuing wrong? (4) Under Sohail Malik, if a Google India employee is harassed by an Amazon India employee at a joint industry conference, which IC has jurisdiction? (5) What are the three primary POSH disclosure obligations for a listed company under the 2025 rules landscape?