K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India

K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India did not begin as a case about privacy in the abstract. It began as a challenge to the Aadhaar scheme — India's biometric identity programme — on the ground that compelling citizens to surrender fingerprints and iris scans to access welfare benefits violated their fundamental rights. To even ask that question, the Court first had to answer a much older one: is there a fundamental right to privacy in the Indian Constitution at all?

Facts

Retired Karnataka High Court judge K.S. Puttaswamy, then 91, petitioned the Supreme Court arguing that the Aadhaar scheme's collection and storage of biometric and demographic data was unconstitutional. The Union government's defence relied in part on two earlier Supreme Court decisions — M.P. Sharma v. Satish Chandra (1954) and Kharak Singh v. State of U.P. (1962) — which had suggested privacy was not a right guaranteed by the Constitution. Because those were decisions of larger benches (eight and six judges respectively), a smaller bench could not overturn them. The question of whether privacy was a fundamental right was therefore referred to a nine-judge bench.

Legal issues

• Whether the Constitution of India guarantees a fundamental right to privacy.
• Whether M.P. Sharma and Kharak Singh, insofar as they held otherwise, remained good law.
• Where, structurally, such a right would sit within the fundamental rights chapter — as an independent right, or as an incident of the rights already guaranteed under Articles 14, 19 and 21.

Decision

The nine-judge bench held, unanimously, that the right to privacy is a fundamental right protected under Part III of the Constitution, primarily flowing from the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21, and connected to the freedoms guaranteed under Article 19. M.P. Sharma and Kharak Singh were overruled to the extent they held that privacy is not a constitutionally protected right.

Privacy is a constitutionally protected right which emerges primarily from the guarantee of life and personal liberty in Article 21 of the Constitution.K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1

Reasoning

The Court reasoned that privacy is not a standalone, freestanding guarantee borrowed from elsewhere, but an integral part of the dignity and liberty that Article 21 already protects — the right to make autonomous choices about one's body, family, sexuality, health and personal information is meaningless without some sphere the state cannot enter without justification. At the same time, the judgment was careful to hold that privacy, like other fundamental rights, is not absolute: the state can restrict it, but only through a law that is fair, just and reasonable, pursues a legitimate state aim, and is proportionate to that aim.

Significance

Puttaswamy did not itself decide whether Aadhaar was constitutional — that question was resolved in a later judgment. What it did was settle the foundational question underneath every subsequent Indian privacy and data protection argument, including the passage of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. Any law today that touches surveillance, data collection or bodily autonomy in India is tested against the proportionality standard this judgment established. It is, in that sense, less a single case and more the constitutional floor everything else in Indian privacy law is built on.