NEW DELHI — In August 2013, a 21-year-old woman moved from Kolkata to Bangalore to work at the Deccan Chronicle, a national daily read by millions. It was her first time away from home and she was determined to make a success of her new life.

Yet in August 2014, one year after she joined Deccan Chronicle, the woman resigned. As she served out her month-long notice period, she sent an email to Neena Gopal, resident editor of the newspaper’s Bengaluru edition, accusing her immediate boss of making sexual remarks, physical advances, and humiliating her in public.

Her 40-year-old boss denied these allegations and sent Gopal a rebuttal of his own. Yet rather than set up an Internal Complaints Committee, as mandated by law for all private companies with more than 10 employees, Gopal put together an informal panel of three women journalists who absolved the boss of all allegations without interviewing either the accuser or the accused.

The Deccan Chronicle, as an institution, did nothing — to the extent that the paper did not even treat the woman’s email to Gopal as a complaint of sexual harassment, despite nearly two decades of legal precedent, ranging from the Vishaka judgement of the Supreme Court in 1997 to the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, passed in 2013.

“I don’t know about Vishaka guidelines, but we set up a panel of three women. Actually, I don’t know if one could call it a panel. It was not a formal thing,” Gopal, who is still the newspaper’s resident editor in Bengaluru, told HuffPost India, when asked how she dealt with the complaint. “Three women journalists checked out the story, chatted about it, and found the allegations to be completely bogus.”

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The group of three women, assembled by Gopal, did not produce any written account of their findings or observations. Gopal said she did not remember the names of the women on the panel. Neither the accuser nor the accused were questioned by the panel. Instead, the panel weighed the woman’s brief email, against an exhaustive 10 page reply sent by her boss — to which the woman was never given a chance to respond.

The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act of 2013 requires the complainant and the respondent be given all documents submitted by both parties.

Instead, Gopal told HuffPost India, the panel spoke with the woman’s colleagues and the dean of the institute where she had studied before she joined the Deccan Chronicle.

Gopal made clear that she wasn’t a neutral party in this dispute, describing the complainant a “nuisance,” and a “dangerous woman who gives women journalists a bad name” in her comments to HuffPost India.

Despite assembling this “panel”, there is no institutional record that this entire process — however flawed — ever took place.

“There is nothing on record,” admitted Mohammed Sikander, Deccan Chronicle’s publisher in Bengaluru, who told HuffPost India that he knew about the allegations at the time they were made.

Sikander said that the Deccan Chronicle did not have an ICC in 2014.

“Upon verification, we found no complaint of any harassment given by the said employee till her resignation on 4th August, 2014, and even in the resignation letter, there was nothing mentioned about any harassment,” Sai Srinivas, the head of Human Resources for the Deccan Chronicle, said in an email to HuffPost India.

While the woman left in September, 2014, her boss was told to take leave for two weeks — and upon his return, was told by Gopal to “be careful in the future”, he said in an interview with HuffPost India.

“This tends to happen a lot, but this is not how it works,” said Nirmala Menon, CEO of Interweave Consulting, who has been part of several inquiry committees over the years.

Menon said that a manager like Neena Gopal cannot deal with a complaint of sexual harassment on her own. “It has to be the ICC. We need to educate people about the law and how to handle complaints of sexual harassment,” she said.