NEW DELHI, MAY 20
The government has quietly dropped the domestic servants from the purview of the proposed amendments in the Prevention of Sexual Harassment at Workplace Bill to be tabled before the Cabinet soon.
The logic given for deleting mention of the domestic servants in the draft bill by the Women and Child Development Ministry is that implementing the law inside people’s homes will be too difficult unlike offices, factories and work sites where co-workers can come out as witnesses.
The ministry’s own statistics show that almost 80 per cent of the 15 domestic workers are women, mostly the under-age girls, who face sexual harassment, but it did not blink in accepting the Law Ministry’s opinion to better keep them out of the ambit of the proposed law.
The bill, which for the first time takes into account the nature of employer-employee relationships in tackling sexual harassment, covers both the organised and the unorganised sector that constitutes over 90 per cent of India’s workforce.
Till recently, the law only protected women employees at their workplace, but the government decided to expand it to provide protection to all those present at the workplace like children of employees and guests visiting the offices and sportswomen at the training camps.
