Aruna Ramchandra Shanbaug v. Union of India & Others

Aruna Shanbaug was a nurse at King Edward Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, who was sexually assaulted and strangled in 1973, leaving her in a permanent vegetative state for 37 years. She was kept alive with tube feeding by the nursing staff of the hospital. Pinki Virani, a journalist who had written about Aruna, filed a writ petition before the Supreme Court seeking permission to withdraw life support — a form of passive euthanasia — arguing that continued maintenance in a vegetative state violated her right to die with dignity under Article 21. The Hospital opposed the petition.

The Court declined to permit withdrawal of Aruna Shanbaug's life support (finding that the hospital's nursing staff — who cared for her — were the appropriate authority, not Pinki Virani). However, the Court used the occasion to authoritatively recognise passive euthanasia as legally permissible and to lay down detailed guidelines for its implementation. The Court held that active euthanasia remains illegal but passive euthanasia (withdrawal of life-prolonging treatment) is permissible with High Court approval in specific circumstances. These guidelines were subsequently superseded by the broader Common Cause judgment (2018).

Aruna Shanbaug (2011) is the foundational case for the right to die with dignity and passive euthanasia in India. While its specific procedural guidelines were modified by Common Cause (2018), the substantive recognition of passive euthanasia as permissible under Article 21 originates here. The case is significant for its exploration of the relationship between the right to life and the right to die — an intersection that increasingly arises in medical law, end-of-life care, and advance directives. Read with Common Cause (2018), these two cases define India's legal framework for medical aid in dying.