The Supreme Court's post-Puttaswamy jurisprudence on DNA paternity testing reflects an unresolved tension between the right to know one's identity and the right to bodily autonomy. Critically examine.

K.S. Puttaswamy (2017) read privacy and bodily integrity into Article 21 [1]. The same Article also shelters a person's right to know their biological origins. Paternity litigation is where the two collide, and the Court's answers have been calibrated rather than conclusive.

The competing claims

• Bodily autonomy: compelled sampling is a bodily intrusion; post-Puttaswamy the Court has held DNA tests cannot be ordered routinely [1].
• Statutory shield: Section 112, Evidence Act, 1872 — now Section 116, Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 — makes birth in a valid marriage conclusive proof of legitimacy unless non-access is shown, protecting children from the stigma of illegitimacy [2].
• Right to identity: parentage determines maintenance, succession and selfhood, so the child's claim is itself an Article 21 interest — the child, too, has a privacy stake [3].

Why the tension appears unresolved

• In Aparna Ajinkya Firodia (2023) a DNA report alone was held incapable of displacing the presumption [3]; in Ivan Rathinam v. Milan Joseph (2025) the Court held legitimacy under Section 112 settles paternity until non-access is proved, setting aside a test order [4].
• In Chaturbhuj Pradhan v. Amar Pradhan (2026) the Court upheld a DNA direction where paternity was directly in issue and no other evidence could answer it [5]. Outcomes thus turn heavily on facts and forum.
• Absence of statute deepens the drift: the DNA Technology (Use and Application) Regulation Bill, 2019 is still not law, leaving standards to judicial discretion [6].

A framework is nevertheless emerging Read together, the rulings yield a workable test — necessity, last resort, and proportionality — rather than a stalemate.

The tension is real but increasingly managed, not chaotic: privacy yields only where truth is otherwise unattainable and a child's identity rights are at stake. Codifying this threshold through the pending DNA legislation, with judicial oversight and data safeguards, would convert case-by-case balancing into predictable law — advancing both dignity and justice under Article 21.