What is the Right to Life and Liberty? How has this Right evolved through the history of the Indian Constitution? (part 4)

Right to Privacy

Case: A nine-member Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) unanimously declared the right to privacy a fundamental right rooted in Articles 14, 19 and 21. Privacy was held to include bodily integrity, informational privacy, the privacy of choice and dignity. The case originated from challenges to the biometric-based Aadhaar Card system. The Court mandated that an individual’s privacy can be restricted only on the grounds of -

1. Legality - there must be an existing, valid law.

2. Legitimate aim - the restriction on the right must serve a legitimate purpose concerning the State, like national security or public order

3. Proportionality - the State’s intervention must be proportional to the objective it seeks to achieve, using the least intrusive means possible.

   The Court also called for a robust data protection framework, which led to the enactment of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, and the DPDP Rules, 2025.

Case: The DPDP Act and Rules have been challenged in the Supreme Court in Venkatesh Nayak, National Campaign for People’s Right to Information and Nitin Sethi, The Reporters’ Collective v Union of India¹. The main contention of the petitioners is that the DPDP Act undermines the Right to Information Act (RTI) 2005. The RTI Act was formally legislated after several SC judgements declared the “right to know” as a fundamental right read into Article 19(1)(a).

Section 44(3) of the DPDP Act imposes a blanket ban on the disclosure of the personal information of public officials, overriding Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act, which allowed disclosure in the larger public interest. 20-year RTI Act jurisprudence has settled the balance between the right to privacy and the disclosure of information about public officials by testing whether information about a public functionary related to any public activity would lead to an unwarranted invasion of privacy and whether the disclosure is needed in the public interest.

Another issue contested in this case concerns unchecked mass surveillance, which allows the State to operate without adequate safeguards to prevent abuse by public authorities. The petitioners also say that no public consultation or legislative debate was held regarding the law’s impact on the provisions of the RTI Act. The changes made to Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act were not separately tabled in Parliament for specific discussions.

The case is pending in the Supreme Court.

Footnotes

1. Supreme Court of India, W.P. (C) No. 177/2026law’s impact. ↩