Why in news?

• The Ministry of Women and Child Development has empanelled institutions and organisations to conduct awareness exercises on the provisions of the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, in order to ensure security of women at all workplaces.
• Around 223 institutes and organisations have been empanelled from across the country to impart training in local languages as of November 2018.

Key Highlights:

• The empanelled institutes will be required to submit quarterly reports through SHe-Box, an online complaints portal, of all the training programmes and workshops conducted by them under the SH Act.
• The empanelled institutes, organisations and companies have so far organised over 700 capacity building exercises that were attended by nearly 50,000 participants.
• The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013 mandates all the workplaces that include any department, organisation, undertaking, establishment, enterprise, institution, office, branch or unit with more than 10 workers to constitute an Internal Complaint Committee (ICC) to receive complaints of sexual harassment.
• The complaints can be registered on SHe-Box, a single window access to every woman, irrespective of her work status, whether working in organised or unorganised, private or public sector, to facilitate the registration of complaint related to sexual harassment.
• Any woman facing sexual harassment at workplace can register her complaint through the portal.
• Once a complaint is submitted on the online portal, it will be directly sent to the authority concerned having jurisdiction to take action in the matter.
• The WCD Ministry has published a handbook and training module on the SH Act to provide information about the provisions of the Act in an easy-to-use practical manner.
• The private organizations are encouraged to customise the Training Module as per their extant service rules and disciplinary procedures prescribed therein.

She-Box:

• The comprehensive online complaint management system- ‘SHe-Box’- was launched by WCD Minister Maneka Sanjay Gandhi on November 7, 2017 for women working in both public and private organisations to lodge complaints of sexual harassment at workplace.
• The portal was launched to ensure the effective implementation of the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act (SH Act), 2013.
• The SH Act defines “sexual harassment at the workplace” in a comprehensive manner, to cover circumstances of implied or explicit promise or threat to a woman’s employment prospects or creation of hostile work environment or humiliating treatment, which can affect her health or safety.