December is the follow-up month at TNM where we go back to headlines of the past for a status update. In this series, we strive to bring the focus back to promises made by governments, revisit official investigations that should have been completed by now and exhume issues of public interest that lost steam over time.
Four years ago, in April 2018, a semi-nude protest by television anchor-turned-actor Sri Reddy exposed the prevalence of sexual harassment in the Telugu film industry. The protest prompted the Women and Transgender Organisations Joint Action Committee (WTOJAC) to approach the High Court in Telangana to look into the exploitation of women in the entertainment industry. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) also took suo moto cognizance of the issue.
Following consistent efforts from the WTOJAC, a collective of women and transwomen activists based in Hyderabad, a High-level committee comprising all police commissioners, labour commissioners including the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation Commissioner, and other stakeholders was formed to study workplace harassment and discrimination against women and gender minorities in the industry. But what happened later? The News Minute did a follow-up.
On April 7, 2018, actor Sri Reddy protested outside the Telugu Film Chamber of Commerce in Film Nagar, Hyderabad, following which WTOJAC held a meeting with many women artists to understand the gravity of the issue and the discrimination they face. Many junior artists who are not part of any union complained about a host of workplace issues including the lack of sanitation facilities at film sets. It also came to light that there was no regulatory framework of conduct for most film-related activities such as talent scouting, casting, and shooting.
On April 11, they wrote to Animal Husbandry and Cinematography Minister Talasani Srinivas asking him to constitute a high-level committee for the safety, security, and welfare of women and transgender artists. Simultaneously, they approached the Telangana High Court and the State Women’s Commission.
Following the intervention of the State Women’s Commission, a High-level committee consisting of police commissioners, SHE teams, film producers, and directors was constituted in April 2019 under GO Rt No 984. The then chairman of the Telangana State Film Development Corporation (TSFDC) Ram Mohan was appointed as the chairman of the High-level committee. In the same year, the High-level committee formed a sub-committee to make recommendations to the High-level committee which would help the government to come up with guidelines to curtail the menace of sexual harassment in the workplace.
Upon investigation, the TNM team learned that the sub-committee had submitted its findings on instances of sexual harassment and proposed recommendations to ensure accountability. Though the report was submitted to the High-level committee five months ago, the government is yet to make this report public for reasons best known to them. The report was submitted in June this year, said A Suneetha, a member of the sub-committee. “The sub-committee did not limit itself to sexual harassment instances but also looked into the nature of gender equality in terms of parity in all departments,” Suneetha said.
Another member of the sub-committee, Kondaveeti Satyavathi said, “The Chief Secretary assured us that the findings would be made public and uploaded to a website, but that has not happened until now.”
The sub-committee had conducted at least 20 meetings with different stakeholders from the Telugu film and television industry in the last three years to design a legal framework to address sexual harassment at the workplace. The COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 delayed the study as interviews could not be conducted. However, interviews were later held online where questions such as the number of members associations have, the number of women among them, the reasons for the paucity of women, the membership fee, etc., were asked.
A similar situation exists in the Kerala film industry as well, with respect to workplace sexual harassment. Following the sexual assault of a woman actor allegedly executed at the behest of actor Dileep, a committee under justice Hema to study the prevalence of sexual harassment in the Malayalam film industry was set up in 2017. However, the findings of this report have not been made public, seemingly because a powerful lobby is against it.
There has been an indiscriminate delay in publishing the report of the sub-committee to the High-level committee in the case of the investigations in Tollywood. The report titled ‘Sexual Harassment and Gender Discrimination in the Telugu Film and Television Industries’ may have crucial details about workplace conditions in the industry and how it affects women and gender minorities.
Recently, the Telangana High Court closed the PIL moved by the WTOJAC citing that the government had already constituted a committee to address the issue, which has left the activists fighting for gender justice anxious. “The High Court should not have closed the PIL. This has lessened the pressure on the government on this issue,” said Suneetha.
The News Minute reached out to Commissioner of Information and Public Relations, Arvind Kumar, who was monitoring the progress of the High-level committee, via email and phone to find out the reasons behind the delay in publishing the report. He remained inaccessible. We also reached out to the newly appointed chairman of TSFDC, Anil Kurmachalam. But the new chairman said that he did not know the progress of these events.
This copy will be updated following the official response.