The challenges of Auroville’s Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) including chart

Auroville’s composition of residents and visitors from a vast array of socio-cultural backgrounds presents a unique challenge for dealing with sexual harassment. How can the community best approach this sensitive topic in a legally effective way, ensuring that victims feel safe and understood? Far from a theoretical question, the cases of harassment are widespread and have marked the lives of many Aurovilian residents. Leela, an Aurovilian student who is working on her undergraduate thesis on the topic of rape and rape reporting in India, confirms this unfortunate reality, which motivated her to take up her particular thesis topic. She says, “Growing up here in Auroville, all the girls that I knew had been sexually harassed, and two were raped.”

This situation has inspired an innovative application in Auroville of the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, enacted in 2013. This India-wide act stipulates that all establishments with ten or more employees must have an ‘internal  complaints committee’, composed of members from the establishment and an ex-officio member, to investigate and arbitrate allegations of sexual harassment by work colleagues, among other formalities. When applying this legislation to the Auroville setting, it became clear that a large portion of Auroville’s commercial units and even services employed fewer than ten people and would therefore not benefit from this important internal recourse and would instead have to approach a district-wide ‘local complaints committee’. Additionally, these committees would only be able to assist those employed within Auroville, and only for situations of sexual harassment taking place in the workplace. 

Legal counsel was sought upon the matter and an interpretation allowing an Auroville-specific sexual harassment policy was given in 2015. A community-wide Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) was established, with the Working Committee of Auroville designated as the ‘employer’. This Auroville policy enlarged the scope of the 2013 Act to cover situations outside of the workplace and the ICC could deal with cases of sexual harassment anywhere within the township, expanding the protection to everyone staying in Auroville, regardless of gender or status.

Confronting the problem

The first Auroville ICC was formed from community members – the majority of whom were female – who had experience of working in the fields of women’s empowerment, women’s health, and law. For every written complaint received, so long as it was deemed sexual in nature, the ICC would convene a hearing to collect statements from both sides and from any witnesses, before conferring internally to make recommendations to the Working Committee regarding the consequences. Timelines are set by the policy itself, so that resolution for both sides can be expected in a timely manner. 

The ability of the ICC to proceed with its work has not been without hurdles. The unique way in which the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act has been applied to the Auroville community as a whole has provoked criticism, but the work continues and the membership is regularly renewed with 

individuals willing to combat sexual harassment around Auroville.

However, despite Auroville’s ICC venturing into new territory with its customised policy, it has already begun to prove its worth. The ICC does not provide public statistics on how many complaints it receives in a year, but Paula, who has been a member of the ICC since 2018, says that the team has handled several cases under the Auroville policy. 

The effectiveness of the Auroville policy and the ICC team in implementing it is particularly critical because of the emphasis Auroville has put on developing and using internal forms of conflict resolution and mediation to address problems arising between members of the community. While everyone, even Aurovilians and Newcomers, has the right to take a complaint of sexual harassment to the police, the current Entry Policy for becoming Aurovilian requires applicants to sign a document stating that, “Internal conflict resolution processes have been created to resolve conflicts arising between the members of the Auroville community with mutual respect and understanding. Residents agree only to involve an external agency after having exhausted the possibilities of conflict resolution based on Auroville internal processes.” 

Developing programmes for prevention

Part of the ICC’s mandate also included implementing awareness programmes around Auroville. Suriyagandhi, a member of the first ICC set up in 2015, took a prime role in the development of this preventive education for Auroville units. Along with the team, she created a chart in English and Tamil explaining what constitutes sexual harassment and what can be done about it. This was distributed to all the workplaces to be posted in prominent gathering places where staff could easily refer to it. 

Their next step was to coordinate with all the unit executives to give staff training in dealing with sexual harassment in the workplace. Suriyagandhi and Vinodhini, a Tamil-speaking Aurovilian lawyer, developed a programme that could be given in the largely Tamil workforces in Auroville’s units. “We had to teach them to speak boldly, because often the threat of salary cuts or promotion manipulation would keep victims silent,” Suriyagandhi explains. The programmes would be given to both the men and women together, so that awareness and prevention would occur on both sides of the gender divide. 

These programmes have been well received. Suriyagandhi says, “At the beginning the participants were very shy, but they showed great interest to listen and even brought forward questions on how to address harassment in their villages.”

Now Suriyagandhi is no longer a part of the ICC, but she continues to work with the aim of preventing sexual harassment and abuse in her own capacity. As a member of the Auroville Dental Centre, Suriyagandhi is involved in educational outreach in the regional schools, teaching oral hygiene. She adds a component on child safety where, depending upon the age of the children, she shows a five-minute awareness video made by the Indian Government, explains about “good touch, bad touch”, and goes deeper into the subject of sexual harassment and abuse. This programme reaches around 2000 to 2500 children every year in the bioregion and larger Tamil Nadu, and she does regularly preventive dental programmes for Odisha and Uttarakhand children in private and government schools.

An ever-changing team

Facing the realities of sexual harassment can take its toll on the psyche and the members of the ICC are changed every three years. It is a difficult work that requires sensitivity, discernment and confidentiality. There is still plenty of work ahead and new people continue to join the team, bringing their strength and vision to support and empower all victims, while striving to keep the justice process internal to Auroville.