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A Pune store manager says his team lost audit marks for wearing sacred threads in October 2024. A second employee issued a formal legal notice to Lenskart after nearly three months of silence on her concerns about the bindi and tika policy. Both accounts surface as CEO Peyush Bansal scrambles to do damage control.

Even as Lenskart CEO Peyush Bansal is reassuring the public that his eyewear company respects all forms of religious expression, two of his own employees have come out with very different stories. One says his team was penalised in a third-party audit for wearing kalwas, the sacred cotton thread tied on the wrist. Another spent nearly three months writing to the company's legal team about the bindi and tika policy before giving up on internal channels altogether and issuing a formal final notice threatening legal escalation. Together, their accounts mark ground-level evidence on dress code discrimination at Lenskart.

'We lost audit points for wearing kalwas': The Pune store manager

Both of the employee accounts were shared by a user on X. The first account comes from a former manager of a flagship Lenskart store in Pune, Harsh Hatekar, who took to X to describe what he says was a direct, documented instance of the dress code being enforced against Hindu religious symbols.

"I was the manager of a flagship store in Pune. At Lenskart, third-party audits are conducted to check grooming standards. In October 2024, my store lost points specifically because we were wearing kalwas (sacred threads); the audit was conducted by a person named Ayush Verma," Hatekar wrote.