Why sexual harassment goes unchecked on Indian campuses

For a long time, Sara K did not know whether her professor’s behaviour constituted sexual harassment. It took her a few months to fully grasp the situation and confide in friends about what was happening.

It started in January, when Sara, who is identified by a pseudonym for this story, was on the verge of completing her master’s degree from a prominent Delhi university. The professor had taught her during her first year too, but had not said or done anything to make her feel uncomfortable. She is unsure what changed in her last semester.

Sara recalled that the professor would often take photos with the students while on campus. Sometimes, he asked asked for photos only with her – she would not know how to refuse, and so would oblige.

On one occasion, when she tried to decline politely, he pulled her in and forced her to pose with him. That was the first time she felt uncomfortable around him. But she was 22 and the professor was 62, and was like a mentor to her. He had a friendly equation with students, and was particularly close to some of her friends. So, she decided to give him the benefit of doubt.

Then, however, the professor began to send her poems about love and romance, in a foreign language that he was teaching her – she was unnerved, and began to doubt his intentions. He then began to text her at odd hours, checking up on her, asking where she was or making unnecessary conversation. She finally stopped replying to him.

“But refusing to reply did not mean that the problem ended for me,” she said. “I would have to see him the next day in class or at the department. There was no way out for me.”

In fact, the situation grew worse. When she did not reply, the professor would text her friends and ask them why she was not responding.

On one occasion, after she informed him that she had been unable to attend his class for medical reasons, he refused to believe her. “I had medical documents with me to prove that I had been to the doctor, but he said I was lying,” she said.

By the second week of March, after almost two months of inappropriate messages, awkward run-ins and interactions with the professor, Sara decided that she had had enough. The campus no longer felt safe. She stopped attending his class entirely.

“Then he threatened my friends and told them that if I didn’t turn up to classes, he would fail me,” she said. She recounted that she had been “a class topper” for several years. “I have always studied hard and done well,” she said. “Suddenly I became anxious about my marks.”

By now, she had no doubt that the situation she was in was not normal, and that she needed to find help. “My friends also told me that this is all very unnatural and that I must take action,” she said.

Sara confided in the chairperson of her centre of study. “She listened to me and then said that what I was facing was indeed sexual harassment and asked me to file a complaint with the internal complaints committee,” she said.

On April 10, Sara filed a complaint with the committee – that same day, she packed her bags and left the city. “I did not feel safe on campus and so I decided to go back to my parents’ house,” she said.

Though she had hoped that filing a complaint would start a process that tackled the problem, over the following months, she grew disappointed with the committee.

She was asked to appear before the committee twice, to give her testimony. But she was not kept informed of any progress in the case. Two months passed, and she did not hear from the committee about whether her basic demands had been met – chief among them, that the professor be ordered not to come anywhere near her.

In early May, Sara filed a complaint with the local police because she did not trust the committee to take action. “I needed to go back to the university to write my exams and felt that it would be better if I filed an official complaint with the police before they started,” she said. “They took my phone and other evidence for the enquiry.”

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Under the Prevention of Sexual Harassment at the Workplace Act, 2013, all universities and colleges must have an internal complaints committee.

In 2016, the University Grants Commission issued a set of regulations formulated to ensure that institutes complied with the 2013 law. The regulations were drafted to protect students, faculty and all other staff on campus, and laid out processes to be followed in cases of alleged sexual harassment on campuses.

One section of the document listed 16 responsibilities of all institutions of higher education, including colleges, universities and deemed-to-be universities. For instance, they had to create awareness about what constitutes sexual harassment, organise training programmes, display prominently the penalties and consequences of sexual harassment and treat sexual harassment as a violation of disciplinary rules.

The document also stated that institutions under the University Grants Commission must “prepare an annual status report with details on the number of cases filed and their disposal and submit the same to the Commission”.

According to 2023 data, there are 1,472 universities in India. According to the All India Survey on Higher Education, there are about 45,000 colleges in the country.

Data from the University Grants Commission website shows that there is a severe failure among these institutions to comply with the commission’s regulations.

In 2015-’16, the University Grants Commission received annual reports from just 143 universities and 238 colleges. Among these, they received 121 sexual harassment complaints from universities and 38 from colleges.

The number of institutions that filed the reports, as well as the number of complaints they cited, remained comparably low in the years that followed, despite a crowdsourced list of alleged sexual harassers on Indian campuses surfacing online in October 2017, sparking a furore.

The year 2020-’21 saw the lowest number of reports from universities, with only 64 submitting them; while 2018-’19 saw the lowest number of reports from colleges, with only 31 submitting them. Even in the years in which the highest number of reports were filed, less than 16% of universities and less than 1% of colleges did so.

Scroll emailed queries to the University Grants Commission about Indian institutions’ failure to comply with its regulations. This story will be updated if it responds.

Surveys suggest that women on Indian campuses face far more harassment and other forms of sexual violence than represented in this data.

One survey conducted in 2022 among current and former female students of colleges and universities in India found that around 48% had faced some form of “explicit sexism” such as cat-calling and inappropriate touching.

Out of the 578 respondents, around 10% said they had been “sexually assaulted by at least one person from their institutions”.

Of those who reported having been assaulted, 87.71% were assaulted by students of the same institutions, 12.28% were assaulted by a faculty member and 10.52% were assaulted by a staff member. Only 15.7% of the students filed an official complaint with any relevant committee in the institutions or police.

Another survey conducted in 2018 by the National Students Union of India in colleges affiliated to Delhi University, found that one in four women faced sexual harassment on their campus.

Approximately 80% of the 736 respondents had attributed “unresponsiveness of the university or college administration as a key factor for unsafe campuses”, the survey found. It further noted, “Not even half of the surveyed students were even aware of the internal complaints committee in their colleges.” Further, 70% of the student respondents “stated that the names and contact details of the ICC members are not prominently displayed in their colleges”.

Sara also said that she did not know much about the internal complaints committee, how to file a complaint or who was on the panel.

“It was only when my friends and the chairperson at my centre said that I should seriously consider filing a complaint, then I decided to find out where the committee sat and what the process was,” she said.

It was around this time that all six of her other classmates also decided to jointly file a complaint with the internal complaints committee against the same professor.

Sara said the professor would often make uncomfortable remarks in class too, which is why her classmates filed a separate complaint. “He would randomly bring up sex, sexuality or related topics. Even though it had no connection at all to the subject that he was teaching us,” Sara said. “He once drew three dots on the board and asked us what it was, and then said it was a bikini.”

Sara recounted that her friends also complained to her that he sometimes commented on their WhatsApp display pictures in class or texted them personally about them. He would also ask students intrusive questions, such as whether they had boyfriends. “So my entire class decided that they would file a complaint, because everybody realised that this cannot be normalised,” she said.

Maria T, a postgraduate student from a central university in the north-east, who is identified by a pseudonym, had a similar story to tell as Sara and her classmates. She recounted that a senior professor at her university would make inappropriate comments in class – for instance, he would ask students “if they were virgins” or if “they enjoyed sex”.

She added, “Then the attention would suddenly be on us and it would be incredibly embarrassing. And also very degrading.”

The inappropriate behaviour occurred outside the classroom also. “When we are walking around the campus, he would sometimes put his hand over our shoulder and also touch us inappropriately,” she said. “When we went on study trips, he would get very drunk and make us feel uncomfortable.”

Male students did not understand what the women were suffering. They would “laugh it off, and many consider this behaviour normal”, she said. But for women students, particularly those “who have suffered sexual violence in the past, this is very triggering”. In many cases, she added, it affected students’ ability to concentrate in the professor’s class and thus harmed their academic performance.

Maria has considered filing a formal complaint several times. But her peers have discouraged her. “Some normalise this behaviour,” she said. “Others are too scared to file a complaint and I can’t do it on my own.”

Maria previously studied in an institute that had an active internal complaints committee and a gender and development cell, of which she herself was a part. The institute also organised some gender sensitisation programmes. So, when she arrived at her current university, she was surprised that there were no sensitisation programmes at all.

There was also no information on sexual harassment policies and preventive measures displayed on the campus, or otherwise circulated. This despite the fact that under University Grants Commission regulations, all colleges and universities are required to display the “penal consequences of sexual harassment, and the order constituting the internal complaint committee” around the campus “at conspicuous places or notice boards”, as well as in their prospectuses.

The regulations also state that college administrations have to ensure that the “institutional community” is aware of the information “on the mechanisms put in place for redressal of complaints pertaining to sexual harassment, contact details of the Internal Complaints Committee, complaints procedure and so on”.

But Maria noted, “We were not given any information during our induction.” Other than some information displayed at one place near the university clinic, she added, “there is no information available anywhere on campus”.

Students of medical and engineering colleges told Scroll that the situation in those institutions was even worse than in arts and science colleges.

Priyanka K, a former medical student, who is also identified by a pseudonym, explained that women medical students are more vulnerable in comparison to students in other colleges because typically medical students and their teachers spend significant time in enclosed spaces. “Because students and doctors are confined to small spaces, doctors exploit the opportunity and touch students inappropriately,” she said. “During night shifts too, students are at a risk of sexual harassment.”

Further, Priyanka said, doctors frequently urge students to “go out for coffee” or “join them in their office” at odd hours. She said they also often say things with sexual undertones. “The students are too scared to upset the doctors, so they’ll just laugh along and not object to it,” she said. “The doctors pass comments on looks, comment on their relationship status.”

In one instance, in a medical college in Tamil Nadu, Priyanka said that a friend of hers complained to the administration, but was then persuaded to withdraw her complaint. “They then shifted her to a different department,” she said. She said whenever anybody has tried to raise their voices about this problem, they are termed “problematic” and accused of “causing unnecessary trouble”.

Priyanka said that there was a total lack of effort to address sexual harassment in medical colleges, and no discussion at all of internal complaints committees or gender sensitivity programmes.

“The course is gruelling, draining and extremely stressful and nobody seems to have the time or energy to pursue a complaint. Most don’t even know that there is something called an ICC,” she said. “The harassment is textbook – but everybody is very scared to do anything about it.”

She added that students like her were also scared to speak up even after they graduated because for future job and academic opportunities, students need good recommendations from their faculty and the doctors they have worked under. “I’m also taking a great risk by speaking with you,” she said.

In some instances, those who seek to tackle the problem of sexual harassment on campuses face hostility from the community.

Suraj Harsha completed a master’s degree a few years ago. At both Kishinchand Chellaram College in Mumbai and Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Guwahati, where she studied for her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees respectively, she was a part of the gender cell run by students, among whose primary functions was to create awareness around sexual harassment. In both institutions, she was also the student member of the internal complaints committee. She said that most other students were not very welcoming of the work that the gender cell did. “They would say, ‘yeh lo gender wale aa gaye’ (here come the gender folk) in a very dismissive way,” Suraj said. Alongside this, she also faced prejudice for being a member of the queer community.

But in both institutions, Suraj said, the gender cell had a prominent place – and so, many people approached it with grievances. “We would provide them with support,” she said. For instance, they would provide information on what constituted sexual harassment and offer to help file complaints. She noted that both institutions failed to comply with guidelines on publishing the list of members of the internal complaints committees on their websites, and did not conduct a sufficient number of awareness sessions for students.

Students of the gender cell also had to battle administrative indifference. At Tata Institute of Social Sciences for instance, Suraj said, “When we approached the administration during my postgraduate degree and offered to print out the posters and paste it in different parts of the campus, they told us there was no budget for the cell to give us Rs 500 to print. So we pooled in money on our own because we saw the urgency and wanted to act upon it at the earliest.”

She added, “We ensured we stuck these posters near the hostels as well because we wanted students to know that even if it happens in hostels, they could still complain to the ICC. That happened to me once.”

But this move was met with hostility. “Within the first week, somebody tore down all the posters,” Suraj said. “When we asked the administration to check the CCTV footage to find out who did it, they refused.”

Scroll emailed both institutions to ask about this alleged indifference towards the problem. This story will be updated if they respond.

Suraj recounted that at both places, those who considered registering a complaint would sometimes ask members of the gender cell if they could promise that the decision to file a complaint would not backfire. “We tell them that we cannot promise them that, but that we can support them in any way possible,” she said.

Occasionally, when students did muster up the courage and file a complaint, they would not receive a reply from the committee. “The chairperson won’t check their ICC mail regularly since it isn’t their work email,” she said. “So students will send complaints and then keep waiting. When they don’t hear back, they feel dejected.”

If more time passed without a response, the students understandably grew more anxious. “Every single day they wait for a response and when it doesn’t come they start to stress,” she said. “Then they come and ask us why no one has replied.” In such instances, Suraj and their team would reach out to the chairperson and alert them about the email. “But by then 10-15 days pass,” Suraj said.

When complaints proceeded past this stage, Suraj explained, they would still face the uphill task of trying to organise the hearing of the case. “We have to figure out everyone’s schedule,” she said. “The external member of the committee should be available, and we also need to arrange for funds to pay them for their time. We have to get the institution to approve the cost of the entire process.”

The logistics became even more daunting when multiple hearings were needed, as they often were. “What if there needs to be three-four more sessions?” Suraj said. “That’s more scheduling and more expenses.”

The availability of committee members, the complainant, the accused individual or witnesses also often presented a problem. “Sometimes if they have gone off for fieldwork, we have to wait 30 days to return and then resume the investigation,” Suraj said. In such a situation, the institution itself was unlikely to take responsibility for following through on the process. “If we leave it to the administration to figure out all this, they will prioritise something else,” she said.

Sara said she had also faced hurdles once her case began to be processed – she recounted that when she went for the first internal complaints committee meeting about her case, there were no student members on the committee, even though it is mandatory that the committee have student representatives. “I felt that there was a lack of support for me because students weren’t present,” she said.

Sara wishes that the committee had at least granted her some form of interim relief so that she would feel less anxious about entering her own campus. Through the month of May, when she had exams, Sara felt she needed some proof that she would be protected when she was on campus. “I’m highly disappointed that despite providing evidence that is definitely incriminating, they still did not consider this as an emergency and provide me with any sort of support,” she said. Though the university is known to be political and progressive, she added, “even here the ICC is not functioning properly.”