Truth over the presumption

For three decades the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on DNA evidence in paternity disputes has grappled with a core question: When may a court compel an unwilling person to surrender his genetic material, and when must it hold back? This case by case balancing pits scientific certainty  against traditional pillars: the legitimacy of a child born in marriage and the right to privacy. A recent decision adds a new variable. How does the court rule when  there is no marriage to trigger a presumption, and the person seeking the truth is the adult child himself?

That question reached the Court in Chaturbhuj Pradhan v Amar Pradhan. Amar, claiming to be Chaturbhuj Pradhan’s son, sought a DNA test. The alleged father resisted. A two-judge Bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and N.K. Singh upheld the order directing the test. The judgement, authored by Justice Karol, is short, but wide-reaching.

The facts

Amar was born in September 1999, he says, following a consensual relationship between his mother and the appellant. The appellant denied this, relying on  his acquittal in a rape case filed by Amar’s  mother. The dispute spans decades; maintenance litigation between 2003 and 2010 reached the Supreme Court but closed in a Lok Adalat because Amar had reached adulthood. Upon attaining majority, Amar sued for a declaration of paternity and a one-third share in the appellant’s property. The trial court and the Chhattisgarh High Court each ordered a DNA test, prompting the appellant to appeal  to the top court.

The issues

Before the Court, the appellant pressed three objections: lack of compellability, no eminent need, and the suit being  barred by res judicata. Beneath all three lay a single claim, that a compelled test would invade his privacy due to prior maintenance proceedings.  Amar argued paternity could be settled no other way, and his interest in the truth outweighed the appellant’s reluctance.

The two blockades

The Court drew on a settled line of authority: Goutam Kundu v State of West Bengal (1993), Dipanwita Roy v Ronobroto Roy (2014), Aparna Ajinkya Firodia v Ajinkya Arun Firodia (2023) and, most recently, Ivan Rathinam v Milan Joseph (2025), extracting its  operative formula:  a DNA test must clear two blockades — the evidence on record must be insufficient to answer the question, and the balance of interests must favour the test. The Bench found both satisfied. Paternity was directly in issue, because the suit existed for that very purpose. It was nobody’s case that the mother had any other intimate relationship at the relevant time.

What the judgement passes over lightly is the most revealing. The relied-upon precedents were built around Section 112 of the Evidence Act, 1872, which presumes  a child born within a valid marriage to be legitimate, and the presumption falls only on proof of non-access. Here there was no marriage, so the presumption never arose. The Court treated its absence as a point in the claimant’s favour. Counsel urged exactly that, and the Bench accepted it. The mirror image arrived months earlier. In R. Rajendran v Kamar Nisha (2025), a differently constituted Bench refused a test where the child was born within a marriage. The dispute there was criminal, but the hinge was the same. The Section 112 presumption was alive and unrebutted, so the first blockade was held. The same framework yields opposite results, and marriage, or its absence, does much of the work.

A protective doctrine, inverted

The doctrine now covers a situation its authors never contemplated. Goutam Kundu sought to avoid labelling  a child illegitimate and the mother unchaste to shield the child. Here an adult child demands the test, and his mother has asserted the appellant’s paternity since infancy. The protective rationale thus drives the order.  Refusing the test would lock Amar into uncertainty and potentially cost him his inheritance.

Privacy and compulsion

The appellant’s strongest card was privacy. Compelled genetic disclosure engages bodily autonomy and dignity. The Court held that the right to privacy is not absolute, and must yield when set against Amar’s pursuit of closure..

However, the reasoning is brief. Since K.S. Puttaswamy v Union of India (2017), an intrusion on privacy must clear a three-fold test:  legality, a legitimate aim, and proportionality. The Bench did not work through these steps, unlike Aparna Firodia and Rajendran, where benches applied strict proportionality reviews. Here the conclusion is defensible, but the reasoning is thin.

A gap remains regarding enforcement. Goutam Kundu held that no person can be compelled to give a sample, a rule later softened into drawing an adverse inference for refusal. The present judgement upholds an order to conduct the test, yet it does not state what follows if the appellant refuses. The genuine lever is Section 114 of the Evidence Act, which lets a court draw an adverse inference. The appellant’s dread of compulsion is therefore overstated. He may decline, but at a steep cost. The Court could have said so.

Acquittal and finality

The acquittal argument fails on established principles. Criminal courts require proof beyond a reasonable doubt, while civil courts operate on the  preponderance of probabilities. An acquittal on a charge of rape does not settle whether a consensual union produced a child. The Court rightly declined to let the criminal verdict bar the civil question.

Res judicata fared no better. The earlier observations against Amar arose  during summary maintenance proceedings, which cannot foreclose a  declaratory suit to settle paternity. Having dismissed the appeal, the Court directed the civil court to fix a date for the test and decide the suit accordingly.

A larger drift

The judgement’s non-reportable label understates its significance. In Nikhat Parveen v Rafique, weeks earlier, the same Bench described the case law’s common thread as a “well-placed hesitation” to order such tests. That self-portrait is accurate as far as it goes. Here the hesitation gave way. Once identity and inheritance turned on a fact that science alone could fix, the balance moved to the test. Genetic truth prevailed over old presumptions and privacy. The restraint lies in the proviso that the test remains a last resort. The Bench honoured it by asking whether any other path to the truth existed, and found none.

Harder questions remain open: the privacy weight of an unwilling adult versus a protected child, and whether an adverse inference equals absolute proof.   What Chaturbhuj Pradhan settles is that no marriage requires  protection and the child asks for the truth, the law’s reluctance yields. The presumption was built to shield families as the law once imagined them. This judgement lets a person establish the one they were  born into.