K.S. Putta refers to the landmark Supreme Court judgment in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) & Anr. vs. Union of India & Ors., which is commonly known as the Right to Privacy verdict. The case originated from a petition filed by Justice K.S. Puttaswamy, a former judge of the Karnataka High Court, challenging the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar scheme. The core problem it addressed was the legal status of privacy, as previous Supreme Court rulings, such as M.P. Sharma v. Satish Chandra (1954) and Kharak Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh (1962), had held that the Constitution did not specifically protect a fundamental right to privacy.
On August 24, 2017, a nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court unanimously delivered the judgment, holding that the right to privacy is protected as a fundamental right. The ratio decidendi was that the right to privacy is an intrinsic part of the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 and is guaranteed as a part of the freedoms in Part III of the Constitution. The judgment explicitly overruled the precedents in M.P. Sharma and Kharak Singh.
The judgment works by establishing that any invasion of privacy by the state must satisfy a three-fold test: it must be backed by a law (legality), serve a legitimate state aim, and be proportional to that aim. This concept connects directly to other fundamental rights, including Article 14 (equality) and Article 19 (freedoms). Furthermore, the ruling recognized that sexual orientation is an essential attribute of privacy, which became a crucial precedent for the subsequent decriminalization of homosexuality in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India (2018). The judgment established the current legal position, replacing the earlier view that privacy was not a constitutionally protected right.