Examine the scope of Fundamental Rights in the light of the latest judgement of the Supreme Court on Right to Privacy. (250 words).

What the Puttaswamy Bench held

• Privacy is intrinsic to life and personal liberty under Article 21 and to the freedoms and equality that make a person a constitutional subject, not a data point of the State.
• Earlier contrary observations in M.P. Sharma (1954) and Kharak Singh (1962), so far as they denied a right to privacy, were overruled.
• Privacy has at least three aspects: spatial privacy (a private space), informational privacy (control over personal data), and decisional autonomy (intimate choices of family, faith, food and orientation).
• The right is not absolute. A restriction must rest on law, serve a legitimate State aim, and be proportionate — suitable, necessary, and balanced against the right.
• Dignity, ordered liberty and the idea of a constitutional republic of individuals, not only of majorities, were the moral grounds of the holding.

How the judgment widens the scope of Fundamental Rights

• Unenumerated rights: Part III is not a closed list of named heads. If a claim is part of dignity and liberty, the Court may locate it inside existing Articles, as it did earlier for travel, livelihood and legal aid, and now for privacy.
• Horizontal shadows: the primary duty is still on the State (Article 12). Yet informational privacy implies that the State must also regulate private databases, because a fundamental right that stops at the police station but dies at a private server is hollow.
• Equality and freedom travel together: a privacy holding under Article 21 is read with Article 14 against arbitrary profiling and with Article 19 against a chill on speech, association and movement.
• Later use of the same cluster — for example on sexual orientation, adultery law, and data protection debates — shows that Puttaswamy is a gateway judgment, not a one-case rule about Aadhaar alone.
• Reasonable restrictions remain. National security, crime investigation, and taxation can still enter private life if they pass the proportionality test. Scope expanded; State power was not abolished.

What the scope still does not cover

• Privacy is not a veto on every welfare database or every criminal search. The Bench asked for justification, not for a vacuum of governance.
• Economic and social rights in Part IV do not become justiciable merely because privacy is fundamental; budgets and statutes still do that work.
• Group claims (caste, language, religion) remain in their own Articles; privacy is primarily a personal liberty tool, though it can protect a stigmatised group’s intimate life.
• Parliamentary competence to make a data-protection statute is affirmed in spirit: a fundamental right often needs a detailed law to be usable against both the State and the market.

Examine, do not inflate

• The latest judgment enlarges the living content of Part III without rewriting the text.
• The real scope test is future proportionality: surveillance, Aadhaar-like seeding, and commercial profiling will show whether privacy is a right or a recital.