Indian higher educational institutions (HEIs) have been a battleground for the implementation of the “Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013” (“POSH Act”) for more than a decade now, 15 years after Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan. This paper aims for an empirical-doctrinal appraisal of the POSH system working in universities and colleges, starting from the Vishaka guidelines to the “UGC (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal of Sexual Harassment of Women Employees and Students in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations 2015” and further going up to the Supreme Court's intervention in “ Aureliano Fernandes v. State of Goa 2023. It presents a stark increase in reported incidents and dispenses, and also in “the reported and the structural” gaps, such as not having a trauma-informed inquiry protocol, ICCs were not always well-composed, and underreporting took place after analysing the Gender Sensitization returns submitted by the University Grants Commission (UGC) from 2015-16 to 2022-23. It will find that even as the judiciary has begun demanding due process protections for the respondents, follow-up action by the education authorities on compliance of the POSH framework is inadequate and its formal architecture is sturdy but its substantive efficacy on campuses is stilted by the continued invocation of the adjudicatory culture of institutional reputation
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