An Analysis of Puttaswamy: The Supreme Court Privacy Verdict with Reference to Aadhar Card

This paper discusses the Supreme Court's framing of the fundamental right to privacy in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India (2017) and what that means for the Aadhaar program in the 2018 Aadhaar verdict (Puttaswamy II). The nine-judge court, by its judgment in 2017, held that privacy is vital to life and personal liberty under Article 21 and inherent in the remainder of Part III, thereby overruling earlier decisions in M.P. Sharma and Kharak Singh that had limited the applicability of constitutional privacy. The Constitution Bench, in 2018, applied a structured proportionality review—focusing on legality, legitimate purpose, necessity, and balancing—to examine how various aspects of Aadhaar conform to or clash with privacy and dignity. Doctrinal analysis is interspersed with a normative assessment of Aadhaar’s implementation, flagging data collection, storage, authentication, and linkage requirements, especially linked to welfare benefits, PAN, bank accounts, and mobile connections. The paper concludes that the Court viewed Aadhaar as a valid welfare tool and approved its use for subsidies and PAN linkage but restricted its use in the private sector, struck down provisions enabling widespread data sharing and prolonged retention, and held mandatory linkage with bank accounts and mobile numbers to be disproportionate. The analysis finds that Puttaswamy has been a game-changer for Indian constitutional law in terms of bringing about an enhanced informational privacy and data protection, but at the same time, it has raised very serious questions on exclusion, profiling, and the adequacy of the existing statutory regime, which essentially brings into sharp focus the need for robust data protection legislation and continued judicial oversight.