The Puttaswamy Judgment is a landmark judicial decision by the Supreme Court of India, formally titled Justice K. S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) and Anr. vs Union Of India and Ors.. The judgment, delivered on August 24, 2017, by a nine-judge Constitution Bench, unanimously held that the right to privacy is a Fundamental Right. The case originated from a challenge to the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar biometric identification scheme, which petitioners argued violated the right to privacy.
The problem it solved was the ambiguity created by earlier Supreme Court rulings, such as M. P. Sharma v. Satish Chandra (1954) and Kharak Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh (1962), which had been interpreted as denying a constitutional right to privacy. The 2017 judgment explicitly overruled these precedents, establishing privacy as an intrinsic part of the right to life and personal liberty guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution, and also protected under Articles 14 and 19.
The key mechanism established is that the right to privacy is not absolute and any state intrusion must satisfy a three-pronged test of justification: it must be backed by a valid law (legality), serve a legitimate state aim (necessity), and be proportionate to that aim (proportionality). This judgment is foundational to the concept of informational privacy and individual autonomy. It connects directly to subsequent legal developments, notably the decriminalization of homosexuality in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India and the constitutional challenge to the Aadhaar Act, 2016. The principles of the 2017 judgment were applied in the 2018 Puttaswamy (Aadhaar) verdict, which upheld the Aadhaar Act but struck down Section 57, which had allowed private entities to demand Aadhaar authentication.