The Bombay High Court has drawn a jurisdictional boundary on the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 that employers running any kind of shared or informal commute arrangement should take note of. The Court held that a shared autorickshaw hailed on the street by employees travelling together — as opposed to transport actually arranged or provided by the employer — does not fall within the extended definition of 'workplace' under Section 2(o) of the POSH Act, meaning an Internal Committee has no jurisdiction over an incident occurring in it.
The distinction the Court drew turns on employer control and provision, not merely on whether the individuals involved happened to be colleagues travelling together for work-related reasons. Section 2(o)'s extended workplace definition was designed to capture employer-arranged transportation to and from the workplace precisely because the employer retains a duty of care over conditions it has created or facilitated — a duty that does not naturally extend to informal, employee-arranged transport the employer had no hand in organising.
Section 2(o) of the POSH Act is deliberately broad in its language — it extends 'workplace' to any place visited by an employee arising out of or during the course of employment, including transportation provided by the employer for undertaking such a journey — and Indian courts have generally read that breadth generously to ensure the Act's protective purpose is not defeated by narrow textual arguments. This ruling is notable precisely because it draws a line within that generally expansive interpretive approach, distinguishing employer-provided transport (squarely covered) from employee-initiated shared transport that merely happens to involve colleagues travelling to or from a common workplace (not covered, on these facts).
Commentary following the ruling has flagged a real practical concern: the decision reopens exactly the kind of jurisdictional gap the 2013 Act's broad 'workplace' definition was meant to close, potentially leaving complainants without an ICC forum for genuinely work-connected incidents simply because of how the specific transport happened to be arranged on the day in question. Employers who do provide any form of official commute — company cabs, contracted vehicles, reimbursed transport — should ensure their POSH policy and ICC jurisdiction language explicitly captures that employer-arranged transport, to avoid ambiguity if an incident occurs there, and should consider whether extending official transport coverage more broadly (rather than leaving employees to arrange informal shared transport) is itself a worthwhile risk-management step, independent of the strict legal jurisdiction question this ruling addresses.