APAAR was introduced to assign students unique IDs linked to their Aadhaar numbers (their resident identification numbers), enabling educational records to be maintained across their academic journey. While the government has consistently maintained that APAAR enrolment is voluntary, its implementation tells a different story. Schools and universities alike have reportedly been directed to achieve 100% APAAR coverage. In fact, until recently CBSE required APAAR enrolment for students registering for Classes 10 and 12 board examinations by mandating the submission of parental consent, without providing any mechanism to opt out.

In December 2025, a writ petition was filed before the Orissa High Court seeking a direction to amend the APAAR parental consent form to include an option to opt-out, keeping with the scheme’s stated voluntary nature. The High Court directed for the consent form to be amended and observed that children are incapable of giving consent, foisting compulsion of having Aadhaar card upon them would be totally disproportionate and would fail to meet the proportionality test. Following the same, recently, the Supreme Court also ruled that APAAR scheme is strictly voluntary, directing the government and CBSE to include an opt-out option in consent forms and ensuring compliance with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (“DPDP Act”) 2023.

The challenge with APAAR extends much beyond its coercive adoption. On a fundamental level, the program reveals significant gaps in the statutory protection afforded to children’s educational data. Section 9 of DPDP Act establishes a high bar for processing of children’s data requiring data fiduciaries to obtain verifiable parental consent before processing such data and prohibits tracking, behavioural monitoring and targeted advertising directed at children. However, these protections are substantially qualified. Exercising its power under Section 9(4), the Central Government has, through Rule 12 read with the Fourth Schedule of the DPDP Rules 2025, exempted educational institutions from these safety obligations where processing is undertaken for “educational activities” or to ensure the safety of children.

The breadth of the expression “educational activities” raises obvious concerns. Neither the Act nor the Rules define the term or prescribe any limiting principles. Read literally, it is capable of encompassing routine administrative functions such as maintaining attendance records, recording examination results, preparing report cards and issuing transfer certificates. Similarly, however, it could also extend to the creation of permanent digital academic profiles like APAAR IDs. By exempting such processing from parental consent, the Rules leave the scope of children’s educational data processing largely to administrative discretion.

The difficulty is therefore not that educational institutions process children’s data; they inevitably must. Instead, the Rules fail to distinguish between processing that is strictly necessary for delivering education and processing that facilitates the creation of lifelong, interoperable digital identities. By treating both as “educational activities”, the statutory exemption risks undermining the very protections that Section 9 was enacted to provide.

This presents a deeper question that the DPDP Act is yet to answer: does India’s statutory framework meaningfully constrain the collection and use of children’s educational data, or does it simply prescribe procedural conditions for its processing?

Even after a properly informed parental consent, the problem survives. APAAR’s own privacy policy is inconsistent about what it collects and for how long. Apart from contact details, it draws in marksheets, transcripts and certificates, and requires Aadhar linkage integrated with DigiLocker’s eKYC layer. What’s worse is that data will be retained until the account is deleted, yet the consent form describes the ID as lasting for the student’s lifetime with neither document specifying a process for withdrawing consent or deleting data once given.

This directly implicates Section 6(4) of the DPDP Act, which requires that withdrawing consent must be as simple as giving it. A regime that cannot say how long it keeps a child’s data, or how a parent might get it deleted, has not solved its consent problem merely by adding a checkbox. The more consequential question is not whether the consent form has a checkbox to opt-out, but whether India’s privacy law has decided what a child’s education data may never be collected for, how long it may be kept and how a family gets it deleted.

The primary statute intended to combat caste-based violence, the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, punishes offences of atrocities committed by non-members of the SC/ST community. However, the Act lacks specific provisions prescribing aggravated measures or independent prosecutorial mechanisms for atrocities by police. The Status of Policing in India Report (SPIR) 2025 noted that the majority of police torture victims are from these marginalised communities. The SPIR also found that caste and religious affiliation often play a decisive role in shaping police perceptions and influencing their actions. The statutory vacuum provides victims with no remedy but to resort to general codes.

While Article 15 of the Indian Constitution prohibits discrimination, public law remedies under writ jurisdiction are inherently limited and can merely mandate departmental inquiries, quashing of arbitrary arrest or illegal detention orders, or financial compensation. For criminal prosecution under the general statute, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the victims have to encounter the formidable barrier of Section 218 of the procedural statute, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, which mandates prior sanction from the concerned State or Central Government for prosecuting a public servant. It has been reported that investigations into the acts of public servants have historically been heavily delayed due to pending requests for prosecution sanctions. Therefore, such provisions result in granting de facto immunity to offending officers.

The CERD has also noted excessive use of force, extra-judicial killings, and sexual violence committed against ethnic groups during law enforcement operations under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), 1958. A similar mechanism of institutionalized impunity exists under Section 6 of the AFSPA, which acts as a procedural bottleneck by mandating sanction from the Central Government to prosecute the armed forces for acts done under the Act. The Supreme Court in the case of Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families Association v. Union of India (2016) ordered investigations into the allegations of fake encounters of the ethno-religious community of Manipur committed by the armed forces. However, almost a decade after the judgment, the court-appointed commission has found six encounters to be unlawful, but their prosecutions have been stalled for want of sanction.

The procedural shield in the AFSPA has historically exacerbated gendered and ethnic violence, enabling systemic sexual abuse against ethnic women in disturbed areas. In 2004, women of Manipur, mainly the Meitei community, protested naked against incidents of sexual violence by the armed forces, holding banners reading “Indian Army Rape Us”. Incidents of sexual violence against women from the State’s ethnic communities have continued to surface during subsequent episodes of unrest, underscoring how little the underlying accountability structure has changed in the two decades since the protest.

These instances reveal that caste-based discrimination, ethnic cleansing through extra-judicial killings, and sexual violence on marginalised women by state actors are not isolated operational errors; they are structural outcomes of a legal architecture that prioritizes state immunity over victim justice. Therefore, the provision of prosecution sanction should be waived for the offences of extra-judicial killings and sexual violence by law enforcement officials. These are offences heinous enough that the ordinary justification for protecting public servants from vexatious prosecution simply does not hold.

Consequently, the government should adopt CERD’s core recommendations, crucially, establishing Police Complaints Authorities in all states and union territories, and conducting prompt and impartial investigations into allegations of human rights abuses against ethnic and tribal communities. India’s blanket rejection of the findings as “unsubstantiated allegations” falls flat when contrasted with the internal records, including domestic reports and judgments. Thus, rather than adopting a stance of denial, India must engage with these findings constructively by closing procedural loopholes and building a victim-centric legal framework.

Domestic Framework and International Commitments

India, being a signatory to ILO Conventions Nos. 29 and 105, is obligated to prohibit forced labour. This serves as the grundnorm for Article 23 of the Constitution, which prohibits all those practices that subjugate the vulnerable elements of society by prohibiting forced labour. Furthermore, the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1976 (“the 1976 Act”), supplemented by the NHRC 2021 Advisory and the updated version of the Standard Operating Procedure for Identification and Rescue of Bonded Labourers and Prosecuting of Offenders (2026),  provides for economic support to the freed bonded labourers. The Apex Court has also emphasised the need for economic as well as social rehabilitation for marginalised workers (Bandhua Mukti Morcha v Union of India 1984).

Legislative Vacuum and Implementation Challenges

Despite the existence of a comprehensive legislative framework, implementation remains weak. The District-Level vigilance committees, statutorily mandated under the 1976 Act, remain non-functional. Surveys for identification remain sporadic due to budgetary limitations, and inter-state coordination for migrant workers is non-existent. Even when the labourers are “rescued”, they receive minimal monetary aid – limited interim assistance of Rs. 20,000 and inadequate long-term support. Despite explicit warnings in the NHRC Advisory 2.0 (2021), bureaucratic delays in issuing release certificates and linking full compensation to trial outcomes deprive survivors of timely rehabilitation, further pushing them back into the cycle of debt and bondage.

These domestic gaps are particularly concerning, considering India’s international commitments. Article 8 of the ICCPR and Article 6 of the ICESCR, both ratified by India, prohibit forced labour; however, the misclassification of bonded labourers as voluntary workers, as noted in the recent NHRC hearing, prevents the invocation of the legislative provisions.

Way Forward: Strengthening Implementation and Accountability

Firstly, the district authorities, in coordination with the Central and State Governments, should institutionalise regular vigilance over high-risk industries through an audit supported by a public reporting mechanism to ensure accountability and transparency. Secondly, the development of inter-state coordination mechanisms would help track migrant workers and ensure rehabilitation without any constraints, thereby smoothing the entire process. Thirdly, rehabilitation schemes need to shift from economic reimbursement to skill development to stop the ongoing cycle of worker exploitation in the name of circumstances.

Fourthly, NHRC needs to focus on developing capacity-building programmes for police administration and labour officials to address the misclassification of bonded labourers and improve rescue operations. Finally, as India serves as a member of the UN Human Rights Commission (2026-2028), domestic reforms must prioritise the effective eradication of bonded labour. Significant progress in fulfilling international commitments under Article 8 of the ICCPR, Article 6 of the ICESCR and the ILO Conventions will enhance India’s international credibility and affirm its commitment towards the global prohibition of forced labour as a fundamental human right.

The doctrinal path to Harish Rana

Indian courts have long guarded against conflating a right to die with dignity with a general right to die. In Gian Kaur v State of Punjab, a Constitution Bench upheld Sections 306 and 309 of the Indian Penal Code, holding that Article 21 does not encompass a general right to die, while leaving open a narrower question, that of a dignified death for the terminally ill. Parliament later softened this position through Section 115 of the Mental Healthcare Act 2017, decriminalising attempted suicide. Additionally, Justice KS Puttaswamy v Union of India located bodily autonomy within Article 21, clearing a path for a narrower right: not to hasten death, but to refuse futile treatment and die without needless suffering.

Indian courts have long been wary of equating the right to die with dignity with a broad right to die. In Gian Kaur v State of Punjab, a Constitution Bench upheld Sections 306 and 309 of the Indian Penal Code, holding that Article 21 does not include a general right to die, leaving open a narrower question, that of a dignified death for the terminally ill. Later, Parliament softened this stance through Section 115 of the Mental Healthcare Act 2017, decriminalizing attempted suicide, and Justice KS Puttaswamy v Union of India placed bodily autonomy within Article 21, leading to a narrower right: not to hasten death, but to refuse futile treatment and die without unnecessary suffering.

In Aruna Ramchandra Shanbaug v Union of India, the Court permitted passive euthanasia in principle but required High Court approval case by case. The 241st Report of the Law Commission of India then recommended legislation, which Parliament never enacted. A Constitution Bench went further in Common Cause v Union of India, holding that the right to die with dignity is intrinsic to Article 21, validating living wills and prescribing a two tier medical board procedure, later simplified in 2023. The right remained theoretical, presupposing a competent patient or an executed living will.

In Harish Rana, Rana suffered a traumatic brain injury after falling from the fourth floor of his accommodation in 2013 and developed quadriplegia and was in a permanent vegetative state sustained through a PEG tube for over a decade. His parents sought a medical board to consider passive euthanasia, but in 2024 the Delhi High Court rejected the plea, reasoning that withdrawal would amount to starvation since Rana was not on mechanical ventilation. Medical boards later found his condition irreversible and withdrawal in his best interests, leaving the Supreme Court to decide: is artificial food and water always basic care, or can it become futile treatment that may lawfully be withdrawn?

A landmark shift, still incomplete

The Supreme Court reversed the High Court, holding that CANH requires clinical judgment and ongoing management of complications, and is therefore medical treatment rather than basic nursing care, falling within the Common Cause framework, a distinction previously echoed by the English House of Lords in Airedale NHS Trust v Bland. It also clarified the best interests test: the inquiry cannot be confined to whether treatment can biologically prolong life, but must weigh prognosis, the burdens and benefits of treatment, and the patient’s dignity as a whole. Crucially, withdrawal does not mean withdrawal of care, and the Court directed Rana’s admission to palliative care at AIIMS under a supervised plan.

This tracks the World Health Organization’s view that palliative care is core to the right to health under Article 12 of the ICESCR. In India, that promise remains largely unmet: nearly 7-8 million people require palliative care, but less than 4% can access it, and coverage stays concentrated in states such as Kerala while much of central and eastern India has almost none. A right to a dignified death, without accessible palliative care, risks becoming a right in name only.

Harish Rana transforms this right from principle into an operational one, yet the architecture remains incomplete. India still has no dedicated statute governing end-of-life decisions, and withdrawal rests on judicial safeguards rather than legislation. Implementation remains uneven, with several states yet to constitute the required medical boards. Thus, the Court has urged the Parliament to legislate, echoing decades-old recommendations.

Health rights are understood as requiring the state to preserve life, but Harish Rana shows the harder dimension: dignity sometimes requires recognising when treatment should end. Ensuring withdrawal is accompanied by palliative care rather than abandonment, the Court has placed dignity at the centre of end-of-life medicine, an obligation that, once medicine can no longer cure, becomes one of ensuring life’s final stage is governed by care and dignity.

Website blocking orders under Section 69A grew roughly a hundredfold in the decade to 2023, according to figures MeitY disclosed under the Right to Information Act. By 2025, that figure had reached 24,000. The shift is qualitative as well as numerical: from targeted, supervised intervention to routine, opaque executive control.

Section 69A carries a tension the Supreme Court never resolved. It permits blocking wherever the Central Government “is satisfied that it is necessary or expedient so to do” in the interest of grounds tracking Article 19(2), which permits reasonable restrictions on free speech on a closed list of grounds including the sovereignty and integrity of India, public order, and incitement to an offence. “Necessary” implies proportionality; “expedient” means administratively convenient, a markedly lower bar that Article 19(2) itself does not authorise. A merely expedient restriction cannot be a reasonable one, so “expedient” is either void to that extent or must be read as “necessary”. Shreya Singhal appears to have proceeded on the second reading without adopting it. Its reasoning speaks of necessity throughout, but the judgment nowhere interprets “expedient” or holds that the word must be read down, and a narrowing that never enters the operative holding binds no one. What the Court actually decided was that Section 69A survives because of its procedural safeguards. The provision the nodal officer applies is therefore unchanged, and it still permits blocking on grounds of convenience. That matters more now that those safeguards are being weakened.

Three changes in the March 2026 draft illustrate how. First, proposed Rule 3(4) would make a platform’s immunity under Section 79, which protects platforms from liability for content posted by users, conditional on compliance with MeitY advisories and directions that are not formal Section 69A orders. This contradicts Shreya Singhal, which held that platforms neither must act on informal government pressure nor lose immunity for refusing. Platforms facing the loss of legal protection will remove content rather than resist.

Second, the expansion of the IDC’s mandate is textual and easily missed. Rule 14(2) currently confines the Committee to “complaints or grievances” about Code of Ethics violations; the draft substitutes “matters”, including those referred by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and Rule 14(5) does the same for the Committee’s examination and recommendations. As the Internet Freedom Foundation has observed, this incentive structure produces systematic over-removal, whatever the motive behind any individual decision. This turns the IDC from an independent check into a body activated at ministerial discretion.

Third, the retention provisions in Rules 3(1)(g) and 3(1)(h) would preserve indefinite archives of citizens’ online expression across overlapping statutes. Speech that is known to be stored and retrievable is speech that gets self-censored.

Blocking orders have reached Whether any of these blocks in fact rested on an Article 19(2) ground is unknowable, because Rule 16 of the Information Technology (procedure And Safeguards For Blocking For Access Of Information By Public) Rules, 2009 applies to every blocking request and the action taken on it.

Amnesty International has warned that the amendments also risk violating India’s obligations under international human rights law. Six journalist bodies demanded the draft’s withdrawal at the Press Club of India in April 2026.

The constitutional position established in Shreya Singhal was clear: executive content control is permissible only within procedural limits that make judicial oversight practically possible, not merely theoretically available. A blocking regime whose orders are confidential, whose grounds go undisclosed, and whose liability rules push platforms toward removing speech without legal warrant has already moved outside those limits. The 2026 amendments do not address that problem. They make it permanent.

The protests, involving thousands of students across several Indian states, were triggered by allegations that the integrity of one of India’s largest competitive examinations had been compromised. As demonstrations intensified, reports emerged of abusive police action against protestors, including the detention of minors, registration of criminal cases, and allegations of disproportionate use of force.

In response, multiple petitions were filed before the Supreme Court alleging violations of fundamental rights. The Court responded by directing authorities not to take coercive action against peaceful student protestors without criminal antecedents, ordering the release of eligible detained minors, and directing the preservation of CCTV footage, body-camera recordings, drone footage, and other digital evidence pending further proceedings. In Para 6, the court also indicated that allegations of police excesses warranted an independent investigation.

Although these directions are interlocutory rather than final, they represent an important reaffirmation of constitutional protections under Article 19(1)(a), which guarantees freedom of speech and expression, Article 19(1)(b), which guarantees the right to assemble peaceably and without arms, and Article 21, which protects the right to life and personal liberty. The Supreme Court has consistently recognised peaceful protest as an aspect of the freedoms guaranteed under Article 19. In Ramlila Maidan Incident, In Re, the Court held that the right to hold a peaceful demonstration to air grievances is traceable to Articles 19(1)(a) and 19(1)(b), while also emphasising that these freedoms are subject to reasonable restrictions, including in the interests of public order. Police action must therefore distinguish between peaceful demonstrators and individuals alleged to have engaged in violence rather than treating an entire protest as unlawful.

The Court’s insistence on preserving digital evidence is equally significant. Modern protests are increasingly documented through CCTV systems, police body cameras, drones, and mobile phones. Such evidence protects not only protestors alleging excessive force but also law enforcement officials facing allegations of misconduct. By directing that this material be preserved and that protestors’ personal data not be publicly disclosed, the Court recognised that accountability and privacy are complementary rather than competing constitutional values.

The decision also aligns Indian constitutional jurisprudence with international human rights law. Article 21 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which India is a State Party, protects the right to peaceful assembly. The UN Human Rights Committee has emphasised that restrictions on peaceful assemblies must comply with the requirements of legality, necessity and proportionality, and that States have positive duties to facilitate peaceful assemblies and create an enabling environment for their exercise, rather than merely refrain from interfering with them.

Importantly, the Court avoided framing the dispute as a binary contest between public order and civil liberties. Instead, it acknowledged that allegations of injuries to both students and police personnel required an impartial investigation. This balanced approach reinforces an important constitutional principle: protecting the right to protest does not require immunity from criminal law, but neither can allegations of violence justify indiscriminate restrictions on peaceful participants.

The NEET litigation, therefore, extends beyond examination reforms. It highlights the increasing role of constitutional courts in regulating the policing of public demonstrations in the digital age. Questions surrounding surveillance, data retention, police accountability, and the proportional use of force are not uniquely Indian concerns. International human rights bodies and courts have similarly addressed the need to balance the policing of demonstrations with the rights to peaceful assembly, privacy, and freedom of expression.

Whether the Supreme Court ultimately develops these interim directions into broader constitutional safeguards remains to be seen. Nevertheless, its intervention signals that effective maintenance of public order cannot come at the expense of fundamental freedoms. In reaffirming judicial oversight over executive responses to protest, the Court has underscored that peaceful assembly remains a constitutional right to be protected, not merely a public order challenge to be managed.

The Interest at Stake is the Users’ Rights

In India, Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution protects not only the speaker’s right to impart information but also the listener’s right to receive it. This right was recognised by the Indian Supreme Court in Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting v Cricket Association of Bengal (1995), while explicitly citing Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

A platform-wide block, by its very design, is over-inclusive: it suppresses the lawful communications of everyone in order to reach the unlawful conduct of a few. The Delhi High Court noted that the government’s directions affected roughly 150 million users who use Telegram for “lawful and innocuous purposes” (para 38), yet resolved the challenge without any rights-holder asserting that interest before it.

The Court thus acknowledged the sheer number of users affected, but not the users as rights-holders whose distinct interests require justification in their own terms. This created a situation wherein the party most heavily burdened, the users of the platform, had no representative before the Court.

The Rights-Holder is Structurally Absent

Telegram, incorporated in the United Arab Emirates, could not have asserted these rights. It is well-settled law that Article 19 is available only to citizens and cannot be invoked by foreign companies. The Karnataka High Court reaffirmed this in X Corp v Union of India (2025), a challenge to the Government’s content-blocking and takedown mechanism (“Sahyog” portal), holding that the rights under Article 19 are citizen-centric rather than person-centric.

While the Indian Supreme Court in Bennett Coleman & Co v Union of India (1972) allows citizen-shareholders to project their speech rights through a company, that route requires citizen petitioners, whereas the Telegram case was brought by the company and not by any user.

Nor were any of Telegram’s Indian users joined to proceedings. X Corp demonstrates that even their presence may not resolve this: there, Indian users sought to intervene, but the applications were “not formally allowed” and were rejected for the reasons given against the platform. Whether absent, as here, or subsumed within the platform’s case, the right to receive information is adjudicated without hearing those who hold it.

The Applicable Standard

How platform blocking in India squares with its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (“ICCPR”) remains to be seen. General Comment No. 34 on Article 19 of the ICCPR requires a restriction to be the “least intrusive instrument” available and binds the authorities applying it, not only the legislature (para 34). The UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression has warned that blocking is often disproportionate because it is “not sufficiently targeted” and reaches lawful content beyond that deemed illegal, and has called for effective remedies for the affected users themselves, including an appeal. A process addressed to the intermediary, not the public, offers no such remedy.

The European Court of Human Rights has developed the same concern. In Ahmet Yıldırım v Turkey (2012), it held that a wholesale block substantially restricted the rights of Internet users with significant collateral effects, and in Cengiz v Turkey (2015) that users who were never the targets of a block still suffer an interference with their right to receive information, and may complain of it in their own name.

When a whole platform is blocked, the interests of lawful users are not merely an aside. They are constitutional interests deserving their own justification. The legitimacy of a platform block depends in part on whether those affected by it have a real chance to be heard. This has not been the case here.

This judgment not only seeks to dismantle the structural inequalities but also criticizes the fundamental flaws in classical economic theories that hold women’s labour in the household unpaid and invisible. Previously, the Supreme Court had, in calculating compensation to victims of corporate negligence, considered the multifarious services by housewives and estimated a value of minimum 3000INR for their labour. Further, in Arun Kumar Agarwal, the court had criticized the equation of a homemaker to a servant as the former’s role involves emotional and physical care that sustains the primary breadwinner’s ability to earn. More recently, a prominent shift can be observed in the judicial approach to quantification of domestic labour to align it directly with the constitutional vision of social equality. Kirti v Oriental Insurance Co Ltd elaborates on the methodologies for such quantification and even goes on to keep room for ‘future prospects’ (considering inflation and experience gained over time). Deconstructing the deep-rooted gender stereotypes, the Court has clarified that the deemed income of a homemaker, can under no circumstance, be less than the minimum wages notified for a daily wage worker. Drawing on these, the 2026 judgment crystallises the legal recognition to homemakers’ contribution to national economic growth.

Seen with a feminist lens, the judgment holds immense value not just for securing socio-economic justice to homemakers but for acknowledging the psychological weight of their labour. The normalisation of their emotional overload as feminine attributes is questioned, especially when contrasted with the praise men receive for their monetised labour in the public sphere. It explores the patriarchal trap of “forced dependency” of homemakers on their earning counterparts, which makes them objects of sympathy at the best and a growing liability at the worst. The Supreme Court has sought to flip this dynamic by elaborating the dependency of earning men on their homemakers. It also upholds that India’s low female labour force participation is far from being a conscious choice of women workers but a direct reflection of the structural imposition of domestic responsibilities on women alone, thereby aligning with the current ILO jurisprudence.

On a deeper level, the Court dismantles the public-private divide in human rights law. Historically, feminists have critiqued the legal apathy toward women’s rights violations in the private sphere. By fixing a financial value for ‘loss of domestic care’, the Court reinforces that unpaid domestic labour is essential to the national economy [20]-[22]. Building on the “double burden” of women juggling domestic care and professional roles, it mandates that compensation for domestic work must be over and above her professional salary.

What holds back this judgment from truly championing the feminist cause is the patriarchal remnants that engender foundational loopholes within the narrative. The context and scope of the judgment are strictly limited to damages claimed in motor vehicle accidents. While a homemaker’s labour is recognized and quantified, it cannot be enforced by her in her lifetime. The State only rewards her labour to her children and husband when she has died. Besides, despite her recognized labour in building the home, she has no statutory right to claim compensation for her labour upon the dissolution of her marriage.

The judgment stands as a landmark on India’s socio-economic terrain, but fails to fully deliver on gender equality inside the households. Mere quantification of unpaid domestic labour will not suffice. Predicating on its feminist approach, a stronger protection of women’s economic rights (instead of a posthumous recognition) is awaited.

The Act was formulated after the honour killing of a 19-year-old pregnant woman, Manya Patil, for marrying a Dalit man. The 242^nd Law Commission of India Report defines ‘honour crimes’ as incidents of violence and harassment caused to couples marrying against the wishes of the community or family.

Though a pioneering initiative, the Act carries a conspicuous omission. Section 2(a) of the Act defines inter-caste marriage as marriage between persons belonging to different castes or sub-castes, while making no parallel provision for interfaith unions. While Section 5(1) carries a general prohibition barring acts against “any person” in the name of caste, custom, tradition or “honour”, the legislation’s structure, definitions and the stated object centre solely on caste, leaving out interfaith couples from its protection. This selective recognition is not neutral as it tracks the same suspicion of interfaith unions that the State has already written into the anti-conversion law.

The State has a protective obligation towards couples in inter-caste and inter-religious unions. In Lata Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh and Shakti Vahini v. Union of India, the Supreme Court directed the Centre and state governments to protect inter-caste and inter-religious couples from honour-based crimes and to uphold fundamental constitutional values. The right of choice of one’s partner is constitutionally protected as per Shafin Jahan v. Asokan K.M., where the Court held that choice of a life partner, including interfaith, lies at the heart of dignity and autonomy as recognised in K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India and also invokes the freedom of conscience under Article 25. None of this compels the State to legislate protection at all. But that is not the claim: having elected to protect honour-crime victims, it cannot draw the protected class along religious lines.

It is important to contextualise this omission within the broader socio-political context. Karnataka’s anti-conversion law imposes stringent punishments for “unlawful conversions” and renders marriages between interfaith couples void where conversion is treated as unlawful under the Act. It empowers the family members of couples to file complaints alleging unlawful conversion, the same actors who perpetrate honour crimes in most instances.

This produces a stark contradiction. As per the 2026 Act, a person in an interfaith marriage is a victim deserving protection; however, the anti-conversion law casts aspersions on the same union, and the same person becomes a potential perpetrator. How can the act of marital choice deem a person a victim under one law and an offender under the other? It is this coexistence that makes the omission arbitrary rather than merely incomplete.

This contradiction lies at the heart of the issue. The distinction between inter-caste and inter-faith couples is perfectly intelligible; the flaw lies elsewhere. In The State of West Bengal v. Anwar Ali Sarkar, the SC laid down that Article 14 permits classification only where (i) there is an intelligible differentia and (ii) that differentia bears a rational nexus to the statute’s object. Here the object is protecting couples who marry against family/community wishes, and interfaith couples face that risk no less than inter-caste couples (242^nd Law Commission report). The second limb therefore fails.

A defender might say this is under-inclusion, not discrimination, and that a legislature may protect by stages. That answer works only where the omission holds a space open for later protection. Here it does not. The excluded couples are not merely unaddressed; they are branded as suspects by the State’s own 2022 anti-conversion law, which the 2026 Act leaves untouched. The State might have protected interfaith couples through some other instrument, but Karnataka has enacted none and offered no reason for confining this Act to caste; an unreasoned exclusion, set against an active regime of suspicion, is not phased reform but a choice. Silence set against that statute is not phased reform but sustained suspicion. In Shayara Bano v. Union of India, the Supreme Court’s test of manifest arbitrariness against legislative action as capricious, irrational and/or lacking an adequate determining principle reaches exactly this animus-based line. And Article 15(1) forbids it outright, since the disadvantage falls on couples only because their union crosses a religious line. That is a constitutionally impermissible classification, not a drafting defect to be cured later.

The court’s reasoning extends a doctrinal arc running from D. Bhuvan Mohan Patnaik (1975) through Francis Coralie Mullin (1981): prisoners retain Article 21 rights, and dignity does not pause at the prison gate. By locating open prisons within Article 21’s guarantee of life and personal liberty, the Court makes the constitutional mechanism explicit: open prisons allow prisoners to maintain family bonds, earn wages, and participate in community life, giving institutional form to a right that protects not merely physical survival but dignified existence. The shift displaces the older retributive grammar of incarceration with one organised around rehabilitation and reintegration.

Empirical evidence reinforces the court’s constitutional framing. According to the most recent National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) Prison Statistics India (2023) report, Indian prisoners operated at 120.8% occupancy with several states above 150%. The Court records that daily per-prisoner costs in an open prison are roughly ₹49.6 per day, compared with ₹333 in a closed facility. Open prisons thus represent a rare convergence of fiscal rationality and constitutional fidelity, reducing overcrowding, preserving familial and economic ties, and lowering recidivism while consuming a fraction of carceral expenditure.

The judgment’s force lies in documenting the structural failures through which constitutional entitlement has not become custodial reality. Open prisons constitute only about six per cent of total prisons (para 19); several states have none at all. Eligibility criteria, including conduct records, time served, and offence category, vary arbitrarily across jurisdictions, with required periods of closed-prison incarceration ranging from four to twenty-one years depending on the state (para 55). Nine states, including Assam, Gujarat, Odisha, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, have formally excluded women from eligibility; in Delhi, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, women are eligible, but no transfer has occurred in practice (para 49).  The Court treats this gendered carceral geography as a violation of Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution of India read together, with Article 14 guaranteeing equality before the law. Equal protection cannot survive a custodial regime that reserves rehabilitative space exclusively for men.

The international legal framework reinforces this position. The UN Nelson Mandela Rules (Rules 4 and 89) require that imprisonment serve reintegration and that open prisons, relying on self-discipline rather than physical security, provide conditions most conducive to rehabilitation (para 27). In comparative terms, trust-based systems, including Norway’s open prisons and the United Kingdom’s resettlement estate, demonstrate that low-security custody reduces reoffending without compromising public safety. The judgment invokes the Bangkok Rules (Rules 40 and 45), requiring authorities to develop gender-specific classification and use open prisons and home leave to the maximum extent for women prisoners (para 51).

The judgment’s remedial architecture raises a structural question. The Court has constituted a High-Powered Committee chaired by Justice S. Ravindra Bhat (Retd.) to draft common minimum standards for open prison administration across states, and directed every High Court to register suo motu writ petitions as a continuing mandamus (a judicial mechanism that keeps the writ petition live to monitor ongoing executive compliance) to monitor compliance with annual reports due by 31 March 2027. Prisons fall within the State List, the constitutional schedule of subjects reserved for state governments under India’s federal division of powers (para 32). The boundary between corrective oversight and the displacement of state authority will be tested in implementation; whether the Court is filling a governance vacuum or normalising judicial management of penal infrastructure is a question the judgment does not resolve.

Suhas Chakma reminds us that their Constitution does not measure justice by the height of prison walls but by the possibility of human reintegration. Open prisons are constitutionally required, internationally validated and administratively rational. The Indian State must now move from confinement to correction, and from custody to constitutional rehabilitation.