It is 11:47 PM. The official team WhatsApp group buzzes. A senior colleague has typed something he would never say across a conference table, lit by fluorescent lights, with HR seated three chairs away. But there are no fluorescent lights here. There is no HR seated anywhere. There is just a phone screen, a blue check mark, and a woman lying in bed wondering if she is now back at work, or if she ever left.
This is the question Indian courts have been forced to answer, slowly, case by case, group chat by group chat. Where does the office end?
For a long time the answer was simple. The office ended at the door. Four walls, a biometric scanner, a lunch break, an exit at six. The Prevention of Sexual Harassment Act, 2013 was written for that world, a world of physical premises and identifiable working hours. Section 2(o) defined “workplace” generously even then, covering any place visited by the employee arising out of employment, including transportation used for the purpose. But generosity on paper and interpretation in practice are different animals, and for years employers used the gap between the two to their advantage. If it did not happen inside the building, it did not happen at work. If it happened after 6 PM, it was personal time. If it happened on a phone screen instead of a meeting room table, it was somehow less real.
The courts disagreed first. Then they disagreed more emphatically.
In Saurabh Kumar Mallick, years before the POSH Act even existed, the Delhi High Court looked at a harassment complaint and refused to be impressed by the absence of walls. It observed that changing work patterns and rising technology meant the idea of workplace had to expand with the times instead of staying frozen as a physical address. That was 2008. Smartphones were barely a thing. WhatsApp did not exist. The court was prophetic without trying to be.
Then came Jahid Ali, where a man sent sexually coloured messages to his superior officer, on a platform, through a screen, with no shared room and no shared air between them. The Delhi High Court upheld his dismissal anyway. A message typed in private, read in private, sent through a wire that never once touches an office building, was still treated as workplace conduct. The medium changed. The accountability did not.
And in 2026, the courts went further still. In a matter involving the University of Delhi, the Delhi High Court held that messages exchanged on WhatsApp and other platforms can fall squarely within the scope of sexual harassment when they arise out of a working relationship, even though the Act itself never once mentions a chat app. The judges did what legislatures are usually too slow to do. They read the spirit of a 2013 law into a 2026 inbox.
This should not be controversial. And yet it took thirteen years and a parade of group chat screenshots for the obvious to become settled law.
Here is the irony nobody in HR wants to sit with. The same company that insists every employee join the official WhatsApp group, the same company that pings you at 9 PM about a deliverable due tomorrow, the same company that treats your phone as an extension of your desk, is often the first to argue that anything said inside that group falls outside its responsibility. The group exists because the company demands availability. The group gets denied as workplace the moment something goes wrong inside it. You are required to be reachable at all hours and somehow not protected for all those hours. That is not an oversight. That is a business model.
It shows up in the annual POSH training too, the one every employee clicks through in twenty minutes flat, eyes on the second monitor, mouse parked on “Next Slide.” The training talks about office premises, lifts, washrooms, parking lots. It rarely mentions group chats by name, rarely mentions a screen at all. Companies are not lying when they teach this narrower version. They are simply teaching the version that keeps the smallest possible number of incidents on their books. A narrow definition of workplace is not negligence. It is arithmetic.
Offsites work the same way, only with alcohol involved. A company retreat, paid for by the employer, attended because attendance was never really optional, dressed up as bonding and team spirit, becomes the site of incidents that HR later waves off as personal conduct outside work. Except nobody personally chose to be there. Nobody personally chose the open bar. The power equation between a manager and a junior colleague does not dissolve because the venue has a pool instead of a conference table. If anything it sharpens, because the usual scaffolding of an office, the desks, the doors, the passing witnesses, is gone, replaced by candlelight and the unspoken understanding that career consequences follow you home from the resort too.
Then there is the living room. Post pandemic, this question got harder before it got clearer. When the entire workforce moved into bedrooms and kitchen tables overnight, the law had to ask itself something it was never built to ask. Does POSH follow you home.
The harassment did not pause for the lockdown. It adapted. Video calls where employees were pressured to keep their cameras on. Meeting links shared without consent and crashed by uninvited guests. Late night messages disguised as urgent work discussions. Stalking dressed up as concern, checking in too often, asking too much, watching too closely through a screen that was supposed to be a meeting room and instead became a window into someone’s private space. The home, the one place meant to be a retreat from professional power dynamics, became the venue where those exact dynamics played out, except now there was no security guard at the gate and no colleague walking past who might notice.
The asymmetry got worse for smaller teams, the ten person startups and two person satellite offices where there was no HR department to begin with, only a founder who doubled as the only point of escalation. A junior employee on a one on one video call with that same founder had nowhere to look away to, no open door, no colleague two desks over who could sense something was wrong without being told. The smallness that startups like to advertise as culture, the flat hierarchy, the founder who is “just a message away,” is precisely what made the living room version of harassment so hard to name. There was no structure to violate because there was no structure to begin with.
Indian courts had already laid the groundwork for this conclusion before anyone had heard the word lockdown. The same logic from Saurabh Kumar Mallick, that the workplace is a function of relationship and not real estate, slotted neatly into the WFH era. If a senior colleague can exert professional power over a junior one through a screen, the screen is the workplace. The living room does not stop being a living room. It simply starts being a workplace too, for the duration of that call, that message, that one moment of misused authority.
What makes 2026 different is not that this idea is new. It is finally being said out loud, in judgments, with citations, instead of being argued about in HR meetings behind closed doors. Companies are now required to disclose sexual harassment complaint numbers in their Board’s Report, which means POSH compliance has quietly moved from an internal HR footnote to a figure that shareholders and regulators can actually see. Suddenly the companies that wanted the WhatsApp group’s loopholes have a new incentive to close them. Not because they suddenly care. Because the spreadsheet now has a column for it.
That is the real shape of progress here. Not moral clarity. Paperwork pressure.
None of this means the system works cleanly now. Anonymous complaints built from group chats are still hard to investigate because there are no eyewitnesses in the traditional sense, just timestamps and screen recordings and the word of one person against another. Internal Committees built for boardroom disputes are still learning to treat a screenshot with the same seriousness as a signed statement. And plenty of smaller companies, the ones without an ICC, without a policy, without a single HR person who has read the Act past its first page, still operate as if none of this applies to them at all.
But the direction is no longer ambiguous. The office does not end at the door anymore. It never really did. It just took the law a while to stop pretending otherwise.
Go back to that woman at 11:47 PM, phone lit up in a dark room, the message still sitting there unanswered. She is not imagining the violation just because there is no desk between them. The Act was written for a workplace with walls. The courts, slowly and reluctantly, are catching up to the fact that the walls were never really the point.
Where Does the Office End
The Prevention of Sexual Harassment Act, 2013 was drafted for a workplace defined by physical boundaries. A building, a biometric scanner, fixed working hours, a clear line between office time and personal time. Thirteen years later, that line has effectively disappeared, and Indian courts are now confronting a question the statute itself never anticipated. Does the workplace end at the door, or does it follow the employee everywhere a screen does.
Section 2(o) of the Act already defined workplace broadly, covering any place visited by an employee arising out of employment, including transport provided for that purpose. But broad statutory language and narrow institutional practice have long coexisted. For years, employers treated anything outside office premises and working hours as personal conduct, beyond the reach of Internal Committees. A message sent at night was dismissed as private. A comment made at a company offsite was treated as unofficial. This interpretation has not survived judicial scrutiny.
The groundwork was laid before WhatsApp existed. In Saurabh Kumar Mallick v. Comptroller and Auditor General of India, decided in 2008, the Delhi High Court held that the concept of workplace could not remain frozen as a physical address. It noted that evolving technology and changing patterns of work required courts to interpret workplace functionally, based on the relationship between the parties, rather than territorially. This reasoning has only become more relevant with time.
In Jahid Ali v. Union of India, the same court upheld the dismissal of an employee who had sent sexually coloured messages to a superior officer over a messaging platform. There was no shared physical space involved. The Court treated the conduct as workplace misconduct regardless. The medium of communication did not dilute the nature of the relationship that gave rise to it.
More recently, in a 2026 ruling involving the University of Delhi, the Delhi High Court held that messages exchanged over WhatsApp and similar platforms can fall within the scope of sexual harassment law where they arise out of a professional relationship, notwithstanding the Act’s silence on digital communication. The judgment effectively confirms what practitioners had already inferred from earlier precedent. Courts are willing to read the spirit of the 2013 Act into communication formats that did not exist when it was drafted.
This judicial trend exposes a structural inconsistency in how organisations currently operate. Employees are routinely required to remain reachable through official WhatsApp groups well outside formal working hours, often as an unstated condition of employment. The same organisations that mandate this availability frequently argue, when an incident arises, that conduct within these groups falls outside their responsibility because it occurred after hours or outside the office premises. The obligation to be present is enforced. The corresponding protection is contested. This is not an oversight in drafting internal policy. It is a deliberate narrowing of exposure.
Company offsites present a related problem. Attendance is rarely genuinely optional, and the informal setting does not dissolve the underlying power relationship between senior and junior employees. Incidents at offsites are sometimes characterised internally as personal conduct unconnected to work, despite the employer having organised, funded, and effectively mandated the event.
The work from home period raised a further jurisdictional question that courts have only recently begun to settle with clarity. If a professional relationship can give rise to liability through a screen, the location of that screen, including an employee’s home, does not place the conduct outside the Act’s reach. Conduct such as pressuring employees to keep cameras on, uninvited intrusion into virtual meetings, and late night messages framed as urgent work matters have all been recognised as falling within this expanded understanding of workplace.
Regulatory developments have reinforced this shift. Companies are now required to disclose sexual harassment complaint data in their Board’s Report under amendments to the Companies (Accounts) Rules. This has converted POSH compliance from an internal HR matter into a disclosure obligation visible to regulators and shareholders, creating a commercial incentive for organisations to close the very loopholes they previously relied upon.
Practical difficulties remain. Anonymous complaints drawn from group chats are harder to investigate in the absence of conventional witnesses. Internal Committees accustomed to physical incidents are still adapting to treat screenshots and call logs with appropriate evidentiary weight. Many smaller organisations without a functioning Internal Committee continue to operate as though none of this applies to them.
The direction of judicial reasoning, however, is no longer ambiguous. Workplace under the POSH Act is increasingly understood as a function of professional relationship rather than physical premises, and the law is gradually catching up to a workplace that has, in practice, never had walls.
