Aadhaar Judgment (Puttaswamy II, 2018)

The Aadhaar Judgment, formally Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India (2018) and commonly styled Puttaswamy II, was delivered by a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court of India on 26 September 2018. The litigation arose from the Aadhaar programme, launched in 2009 and administered by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which assigns a twelve-digit unique identity number linked to demographic and biometric data—fingerprints and iris scans. The legislative anchor was the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016, passed controversially as a Money Bill under Article 110 of the Constitution. The case was the sequel to Puttaswamy I (24 August 2017), in which a nine-judge bench had unanimously held that the right to privacy is a fundamental right intrinsic to Article 21's guarantee of life and personal liberty, thereby establishing the constitutional yardstick against which Aadhaar would be measured.

The bench, headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra with Justices A.K. Sikri (who authored the majority opinion), A.M. Khanwilkar, D.Y. Chandrachud, and Ashok Bhushan, decided the matter by a 4-1 majority. The petitioners contended that mandatory biometric enrolment created a surveillance architecture violating privacy, dignity, and the principle of informed consent. The Court applied the proportionality test articulated in Puttaswamy I, which requires that any state intrusion into privacy pursue a legitimate aim, be rationally connected to that aim, constitute the least restrictive measure, and maintain a balance between the public interest served and the rights curtailed. Applying this framework, the majority concluded that Aadhaar served the legitimate state aim of ensuring leak-proof delivery of welfare subsidies to the marginalised under Article 7 of the Act and survived proportionality scrutiny for that limited purpose.

The Court simultaneously dismantled the programme's broader reach. It struck down Section 57 of the Aadhaar Act, which had permitted private corporations and any "body corporate or person" to demand Aadhaar authentication, thereby ending the legal basis for banks, telecom operators, and private apps to compel Aadhaar linkage. It read down Section 7 so that no child could be denied benefits for lack of Aadhaar and no essential service could be refused on authentication failure. It invalidated Section 33(2), which had allowed disclosure of identity information in the interest of national security on the authorisation of a Joint Secretary, demanding instead a higher judicial-officer threshold. Crucially, the majority upheld the Lok Sabha Speaker's certification of the Act as a Money Bill—the holding most forcefully contested in dissent.

In subsequent administrative practice, the judgment reshaped policy across Indian ministries. The Reserve Bank of India and the Department of Telecommunications withdrew circulars mandating Aadhaar-bank and Aadhaar-SIM linkage following the ruling. Parliament responded with the Aadhaar and Other Laws (Amendment) Act, 2019, which reintroduced voluntary Aadhaar authentication for banking and telecom through a consent-based "offline verification" mechanism, prompting fresh challenges. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology continued to require Aadhaar for the Public Distribution System and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the precise welfare functions the Court had sanctioned under Section 7.

The Aadhaar Judgment is distinct from Puttaswamy I, which established the right to privacy in the abstract; Puttaswamy II applied that right to a concrete statutory scheme. It must also be distinguished from the Money Bill question, which the Court's 2018 majority resolved in the government's favour but which a seven-judge bench was later directed to reconsider in Rojer Mathew v. South Indian Bank (2019), leaving the certification's correctness formally unsettled. The judgment is further distinguishable from data-protection law proper: it did not enact a statutory data-protection regime, a gap subsequently addressed only by the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.

The most cited controversy is the dissent of Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, who held the entire Aadhaar Act unconstitutional. He reasoned that its passage as a Money Bill was a "fraud on the Constitution" because the Act contained provisions extending beyond the categories enumerated in Article 110, that the architecture enabled profiling and surveillance incompatible with informational self-determination, and that the absence of a robust data-protection law rendered the scheme constitutionally infirm. Critics also point to documented welfare exclusions—reports of authentication failures denying rations to the elderly and manual labourers whose fingerprints had degraded—as evidence that the proportionality balance was misjudged. The 2019 amendment's revival of private-sector authentication continues to generate litigation testing the boundaries the Court intended to fix.

For the working practitioner, the Aadhaar Judgment is a foundational text on the relationship between digital identity, welfare delivery, and constitutional rights in the world's largest biometric ID system. UPSC General Studies Paper II candidates should grasp its proportionality reasoning, the Money Bill controversy, and the specific provisions struck or read down. Policy researchers and desk officers tracking digital governance treat the ruling as the doctrinal baseline for India's data-protection trajectory and as a frequently cited comparative reference in global debates over national identity programmes, mandatory enrolment, and the permissible scope of state and private access to citizen biometric data.