SC balances child’s right to know paternity and alleged father’s right to privacy

Account subscription benefits alongside Premium Stories, Editorials, Opinions and more. Unlock these with Subscription

The View From India Looking at World Affairs from the Indian perspective.

First Day First Show News and reviews from the world of cinema and streaming.

Today's Cache Your download of the top 5 technology stories of the day.

Data Point Decoding the headlines with facts, figures, and numbers

Health Matters Ramya Kannan writes to you on getting to good health, and staying there

The Hindu On Books Books of the week, reviews, excerpts, new titles and features.

Image used for representational purpose. | Photo Credit: iStock/Getty Images

The Supreme Court in a ruling last week upheld the use of DNA test in a long-running paternity dispute, addressing the complex question of whether an individual’s right to privacy overrides the need to determine parentage.

Earlier, the top court had consistently held in various judgments that DNA tests should not be ordered routinely, but there has never been a conclusive answer to when they should be permitted.

Paternity cases largely revolved around the concerns of legitimacy and the need to avoid illegitimising children. However, after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision of Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India in 2017 which ruled that the right to privacy is a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution, the court has continuously ruled that compulsory DNA testing interferes with an individual’s right to privacy and bodily autonomy.

In the present case, Justice Sanjay Karol and N. Kotiswar Singh upheld the trial court order directing a DNA test to prove paternity. The alleged father, appellant in this matter, approached the court to overturn the trial order.

In addition to this, there is Section 112 of the Evidence Act 1872 (Section 116 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam), which states that a child is presumed to be legitimate unless the party disputing paternity proves that there was non-access for the relevant period of the marriage and it is upon the alleged father to prove the non-access.

If we look into a series of older cases, the court has pulled back from using the DNA test to prove paternity. Especially since the above said section was enacted in 1872, when there was no scientific means to determine paternity. However, the DNA testing method became commercially available in India by the 1980s.

In Kunhiraman v. Manoj, the Kerala High Court in 1991 accepted the results of a DNA paternity test after a magistrate had ordered its use to determine paternity. IN this particu