Every GCC I’ve worked with as an External Member has a POSH policy. Most of them are good documents, properly worded, properly circulated, properly acknowledged in the onboarding checklist. And almost none of them answer the question that actually shows up in the room once a complaint lands, “whose jurisdiction is this, exactly?”
That’s not a rhetorical question. India’s Prevention of Sexual Harassment Act, 2013 was written for a workplace that sits inside one building, inside one legal entity, inside one country. A GCC rarely looks like that. The complainant is in Bengaluru, the person she’s naming is a director in Austin who she’s only ever met on video calls. Her reporting line runs through someone who isn’t even on the Indian entity’s payroll. The Internal Committee she’s supposed to approach is still yet to figure out how far its writ actually runs.
The Act assumes a workplace that GCCs don’t have
Section 4 of the POSH Act requires every employer with ten or more employees to constitute an Internal Committee at every office or branch. The committee needs a senior woman as Presiding Officer, at least two employee members, and one External Member from an NGO or with relevant experience in sexual harassment, labour, or gender rights work. At least half the committee has to be women. The tenure is three years. None of this is unusual and none of it is hard to set up correctly.
What the Act doesn’t anticipate is an “employer” whose actual decisionmakers sit in a different country, under a different employment contract, answerable to a different board. It doesn’t anticipate a respondent who has never set foot in the office the complainant works from. It doesn’t anticipate a reporting structure engineered to keep the Indian entity’s managers from having real authority over the people the Indian workforce actually reports to.
Courts have been generous in reading the Act’s definitions broadly to protect the aggrieved woman. The Supreme Court has held that “workplace” under Section 2(o) is a wide term covering any place an employee visits in the course of employment, and that an internal committee’s jurisdiction isn’t limited to cases where the respondent belongs to the same workplace as the complainant.
Fault line one: the respondent is abroad
The scenario I see most often is an Indian employee names a senior leader who sits with the global parent someone she interacted with on a call, at an offsite, during an India visit.The Internal Committee still has to examine the workplace impact in India, because the harm, if any, landed on an employee working in India. What the Act doesn’t solve is enforcement, an IC can uphold a complaint and recommend action but it has no power to compel a foreign national employed by a foreign entity to appear or enforce its recommendation on a payroll it doesn’t control.
The second complication is worse than the first, most global parents run their own ethics or investigation process for exactly this kind of complaint. If that process and the Indian IC’s inquiry aren’t coordinated with respect to timelines, evidentiary standards and inquiry system, robust investigation is not possible. You get two committees reaching different conclusions on the same facts because the process was neither fair nor consistent. I have seen this exact inconsistency become the actual litigation risk more than the underlying allegation itself.
Fault line two: constituting an IC when the “manager” isn’t in India
This one is structural and the one legal teams underestimate most. A lot of GCCs are set up with reporting lines that run functionally to the global parent, precisely because the work is genuinely managed from there. That’s often fine until the question of who the “employer” is for POSH purposes arises.
A Delhi High Court ruling in 2025 held that the person who exercises real control over the workplace and its employees falls within the definition of employer, regardless of title and that this has direct consequences for who on an IC should recuse from a given matter. If the actual managerial authority rests with someone who isn’t an employee of the Indian entity at all, you don’t just have an awkward organisational chart, you have a genuine question about whether the person named in a complaint is even someone the Indian IC has standing to examine as a respondent under the Act.
I want to flag the tax angle here too, because employment counsel and tax counsel at most GCCs don’t talk to each other nearly enough. The same reporting line ambiguity that creates a POSH jurisdiction problem is the same fact pattern the Indian tax department examines when deciding whether a GCC constitutes a permanent establishment of the foreign parent. Fixing the reporting line clarity for one purpose tends to fix it for the other.
Fault line three: the respondent was never on the Indian payroll
Lets take a GCC employee who is harassed by a vendor representative, a consultant, a client-side contact, or a visiting executive from a sister entity, someone who isn’t on anyone’s Indian payroll. The POSH Act doesn’t require the respondent to be an employee of the same workplace or an employee at all for the complaint to be valid. The complainant is employed by the GCC the respondent belongs to a vendor, a group company, or the parent. Jurisdiction becomes genuinely contested, and the quality of your documentation including who was present, what the contractual relationship was, what access the individual had to the workplace, becomes the thing that determines whether the inquiry can proceed smoothly.
Why the External Member seat is the load-bearing wall
Get the composition wrong and none of the jurisdictional analysis above matters because the inquiry itself is void. Indian courts have been unambiguous on this. The Bombay High Court held in Jaya Kodate v. Rashtrasant Tukdoji Maharaj Nagpur University (2014) that an IC without a properly qualified External Member is not validly constituted under Section 4, and its findings can be set aside on that basis alone. The Delhi High Court reached a similar conclusion in Global Health Pvt. Ltd. v. LCC, Delhi (2021) clarifying that no valid External Member means no valid IC, and the complaint has to approach the Local Complaints Committee instead. A written complaint is also a prerequisite for the IC to have jurisdiction at all, verbal awareness of an incident even at management level, doesn’t trigger it.
This matters more at a GCC than almost anywhere else, precisely because GCCs scale fast. Committees get constituted as a Day-90 compliance checkbox during entity setup, External Members get appointed without anyone checking whether they meet the Rule 4 criteria, and rarely revisit the composition when the three-year term quietly lapses.
What actually needs to be built
- A written protocol with the global parent’s ethics/investigation function that specifies who leads when a complaint touches both shared evidentiary standards
- Explicit policy language on scope. Remote work, travel, offsites, and digital communication are already within an IC’s jurisdiction so writing the same down prevents counter arguments during court proceedings.
- A clear-eyed answer to who the employer is, for any manager who isn’t on the Indian entity’s payroll, cross-checked with how the reporting lines are structured.
- A documented process for third-party respondents vendors, consultants, visiting executives, including how access and cooperation will be secured.
- A standing calendar check on IC composition and tenure, with the External Member’s credentials verified against Rule 4.
None of this is complicated law. It’s unglamorous, cross-functional, and it rarely gets built until after a crossborder complaint exposes the gap. My advice for what it’s worth, is to build it before that complaint arrives and not while you’re sitting across the table from it.
