‘Clean toilet basic need’: Delhi High Court slams Jamia for demanding apology from woman prof who sought ‘usable’ washroom

Justice Narula said that a safe and secure environment for women at workplace is not to be understood in narrow sense.

The court went on to add that while a grievance relating to access to a hygienic restroom at the workplace, especially when raised by a woman employee who also asserts a physical difficulty in using certain types of facilities, is not a matter to be trivialised.

Highlighting that it is not a matter to be converted into a question of institutional discipline at the first instance, Justice Narula said, “The universities are not merely administrative establishments. They are places expected to exhibit maturity, fairness, and sensitivity in dealing with human concerns arising within their own precincts.”

‘Clean, usable toilet part of basic working conditions’

• A safe and secure environment for women at the workplace is not to be understood in a narrow sense.
• It includes conditions that enable them to work with dignity, decency, and due respect.
• Access to clean, usable, and dignified restroom facilities is part of those elementary working conditions.
• It is not for this court to prescribe the precise modality by which the university should manage or allocate its restroom facilities.
• That lies within the administrative domain of the institution.
• A grievance of this nature ought not to be met with punitive formalism.
• An order directing the petitioner to tender a written apology is unsustainable, since they disclose a manifestly disproportionate response to her grievance, proceeds on an unduly formalistic view of procedural discipline in a matter involving hygiene and dignity at the workplace, and culminates in a direction to apologise that cannot be justified in law.

Matter of dignity, hygiene, and humane working conditions

• The entire course adopted by the respondent university is deeply unfortunate.
• The court is conscious that no employee can claim licence to disregard institutional discipline, nor can official communications be couched in language that is discourteous or imputative.
• Decorum in institutional functioning serves an important purpose.
• At the same time, the insistence on channel, form, and hierarchy cannot become so rigid that it overwhelms the substance of a grievance which plainly touches dignity, hygiene, and humane working conditions.
• A complaint of this nature called for engagement, not escalation.
• The university’s response, as reflected in the impugned action, appears to have lost sight of that distinction.
• Even assuming that the petitioner’s communication could have been more measured in expression or routed differently, the proportionate institutional response ought to have been to address the grievance, counsel the employee if required, and bring the matter to rest.
• What has happened instead is that a workplace concern has been transmuted into a disciplinary proceeding and, ultimately, into a command that the petitioner must apologise. This is plainly unsustainable.

‘Apology can’t extracted through orders’

• An apology, to retain any meaning, must be voluntary. It cannot be extracted through office orders.
• Still less can it be imposed as the institutional answer to a grievance concerning access to a basic and hygienic facility at the workplace.
• A direction to apologise in such circumstances carries the unfortunate suggestion that the raising of the grievance itself was wrong.
• That is where the university, in the view of the court, clearly adopted an untenable course.
• The matter must also be seen in its proper constitutional and institutional setting.

Directions to university

• Consider and address the petitioner’s grievance afresh, as an administrative matter, with due sensitivity to hygiene, privacy, dignity, and her stated medical condition.

• This exercise is to be undertaken by the competent authority and completed within four weeks from the date of the order.
• Until such a decision is taken, the university shall ensure that the Petitioner is not left without access to a hygienic and reasonably suitable restroom facility, bearing in mind the health difficulty asserted by her.

Background

• The petitioner, a senior professor with over two decades of service at JMI, approached the court after being ordered to submit a written apology for alleged “misconduct and insubordination”.
• The dispute originated from a complaint filed by the professor in December 2024 regarding the restroom facilities at the Centre for West Asian Studies.
• She was seeking that one standalone restroom in the centre be designated as a “Ladies Toilet”, which, according to her, was consistent with the practice in other centres in the same building and in various departments of the university.
• She alleged that she had been using a specific facility that was later placed under lock and key, and subsequently opened to “indiscriminate common use,” leading to a deterioration in hygiene.
• She further pointed out that the restroom in question had a western-style commode and that this was necessary for her use because of a knee condition, which made squatting difficult.
• The university viewed the professor’s direct communication to the registrar as a violation of the “proper channel”.
• The university issued a show-cause notice on August 1, 2025, and subsequently constituted a committee to examine her reply.
• This process culminated in an office order dated January 2, 2026, which formally demanded a written apology for using “objectionable language” and failing to follow official procedures.

Institutional escalation

• A reading of the impugned material shows that the university has taken exception less to the substance of the grievance and more to the manner in which it was raised.
• The petitioner has been faulted for not following the “proper channel” while addressing her communication to the Registrar.
• The tenor of the show-cause notice further suggests that the university viewed the petitioner’s act of pursuing this grievance as amounting to misconduct and insubordination.
• And also considered parts of her complaint objectionable vis-à-vis the statutory officers of the university.

Courts on need of clean toilet

• On February 25, while disposing of a plea for the maintenance and upkeep of women’s washrooms at Saket court, the Delhi High Court recently observed that the presence of clean and functional toilet facilities, particularly for women, is inseparable from dignity and privacy.
• Justice Purushaindra Kumar Kaurav noted that clean and accessible washrooms must be considered not as peripheral amenities but as foundational requirements of a functional justice system.
• The court said that equality under Articles 14 and 15 of the Constitution is not secured by formal declarations alone; it requires institutional arrangements that accommodate basic biological realities. Clean and accessible washrooms are, therefore, to be considered not as peripheral amenities but foundational requirements of a functional justice system.