Last verified: July 2026
A postgraduate student at a private “deemed-to-be” university is expelled three weeks before her final placements. The charge is an alleged exam-hall violation. She says no one gave her a hearing, no committee heard her side, and the order simply appeared on the notice board. She wants it quashed. Her lawyer listens, then asks a question that has nothing to do with whether she cheated: “Is this university a ‘State’ under Article 12?”
That sounds like a detour. It isn’t. It’s the whole case.
If the university is a “State” within the meaning of Article 12, she can walk into the High Court with a writ petition under Article 226, or even the Supreme Court under Article 32, and argue that expelling her without a hearing violated her fundamental right to equality and fair treatment under Article 14. The court can quash the order in weeks. If the university is not a “State”, that constitutional door narrows sharply, and she may be left with a slow, ordinary civil suit for breach of contract, no fundamental rights in play at all.
Here’s the thing. That same threshold question runs, silently, through thousands of disputes every year. The employee sacked by a government company. The contractor blacklisted by a statutory board. The cricketer dropped by the national selection body. The borrower whose vehicle is seized by a finance company. Each of them, before anyone reaches the merits, hits the same gate: is the body I’m fighting a “State”?
Article 12 is that gate. It’s the definition clause that decides who Part III of the Constitution can actually be enforced against. Get it right and the most powerful remedies in Indian law open up. Get it wrong and your writ petition is dismissed at the threshold, not because you were treated fairly, but because you sued the wrong kind of body.
And the line is not obvious. A body funded partly by the government may or may not be a “State”. A private company following regulator’s rules is usually not. A cricket board that controls an entire national sport is not a “State”, yet you can still take it to a High Court. The Supreme Court has spent nearly six decades drawing and redrawing this boundary, one landmark judgment at a time. This guide walks through where the line sits today, and how the courts got there.
So what counts as the “State” under Article 12? The Article defines “the State”, for the purpose of fundamental rights, to include four things: the Government and Parliament of India, the Government and Legislature of each State, all local authorities within India, and “other authorities” within the territory of India or under the control of the Government of India. The first three are easy. The litigation is almost always about the fourth, “other authorities”, which the Supreme Court reads through the “instrumentality or agency of the State” test, refined in 2002 into the “deep and pervasive control” test.
This piece works through who qualifies, using the judgments that drew the lines. It also covers the part most explainers skip: what happens when a body is not a “State” at all, yet a writ still lies against it under Article 226.
Why the “State” question decides your fundamental-rights case
Most of the fundamental rights in Part III are, by design, guarantees against the government. When Article 14 promises equality before the law, or Article 21 protects life and personal liberty, the party being restrained is the State. That is the default architecture of Part III: the citizen on one side, State power on the other. So the moment you want to enforce one of these rights, the Constitution needs to know who the “State” is. Article 12 supplies the answer.
Why does that classification carry so much weight? Because two of the most important provisions in the Constitution hang off it. Article 13 declares that any law, or any State action, that takes away or abridges a fundamental right is void to that extent. And Articles 32 and 226 give you the machinery to enforce that: the writ petition, a fast, powerful remedy that lets a court quash an illegal order, direct a public body to do its duty, or strike down a bad law. Both of those provisions only bite where there is “State” action to challenge.
So a court hearing a fundamental-rights claim asks the threshold question first. Is the respondent a “State” or an “authority” under Article 12? If the answer is yes, Part III applies, and the writ court can step in. If the answer is no, the petitioner is generally sent back to ordinary remedies: a civil suit, a consumer complaint, a statutory appeal. Same grievance, completely different forum, purely because of how the respondent is classified.
That is why the definition matters so much in practice, and why it has been litigated so heavily. For the broader map of where these rights sit, our overview of fundamental rights under the Indian Constitution sets out the full Part III scheme. This guide zooms in on the gate that controls access to all of it.
What Article 12 actually says: the four limbs of “the State”
Article 12 opens with the words “In this Part, unless the context otherwise requires, the State includes…”. Two things follow from that phrasing. First, the definition operates only “in this Part”, meaning Part III, the fundamental rights chapter (a similar, separate definition governs the Directive Principles in Part IV). Second, the word is “includes”, not “means”, so the definition is deliberately open-ended rather than a closed list.
What it includes falls into four limbs.
The three straightforward limbs
The first limb is the Government and Parliament of India: the Union executive and the Union legislature, along with their departments and offices. The second is the Government and the Legislature of each State: the same at the State level. Nobody seriously disputes these. When a central ministry issues an arbitrary order, or a State law discriminates, the “State” element is obvious.
The third limb is “all local authorities” within the territory of India. This covers the bodies of local self-government: municipal corporations, municipalities, panchayats, district boards, improvement trusts, port trusts. The common thread the courts look for is a body that has its own local fund and its own governing power over a defined area, entrusted with functions the State would otherwise perform. A municipal corporation levying a house tax is exercising exactly that kind of delegated governmental power, so it acts as a “State”.
“Other authorities”: the limb that launched a thousand cases
Then comes the fourth limb, and this is where almost all the difficulty lives: “other authorities within the territory of India or under the control of the Government of India”. The Constitution does not define “other authorities”. It offers no list, no test, no examples. That silence is the reason this single phrase has generated more litigation than perhaps any other definitional clause in the Constitution.
The problem is real and modern. The State no longer governs only through ministries and municipalities. It acts through statutory corporations, government companies, registered societies, universities, boards and financial institutions. Are these part of the “State” for fundamental-rights purposes, or are they outside it? If a public sector giant can dismiss an employee arbitrarily and escape Article 14 simply because it is incorporated as a company, the fundamental rights guarantee would be easy to sidestep. The Supreme Court has refused to let form defeat substance, and the “other authorities” jurisprudence is the record of how it did so.
For a deeper treatment of the definitional text and each limb in isolation, the companion explainer on Article 12 of the Indian Constitution breaks the clause down clause by clause. The rest of this guide is about the harder, practical question: given a real body in front of you, how do you know which side of the line it falls on?
The test for “other authorities”: from statutory body to deep and pervasive control
The test did not arrive fully formed. It was built up over roughly thirty-five years, judgment by judgment, each one reacting to the last. Follow that arc and the current law stops being a set of abstract factors and starts making sense as a story about the courts widening the net, then tightening the mesh.
It began with a narrow question of grammar. In Rajasthan State Electricity Board v. Mohan Lal, (1967) 3 SCR 377, a five-judge bench was urged to read “other authorities” narrowly, as covering only bodies of the same genus as the governments and local authorities named before it. The Court rejected that “ejusdem generis” argument outright. There was no common genus, it held, so the phrase could not be cut down that way. “Other authorities” meant every authority created by statute on which the law confers powers to carry out governmental or quasi-governmental functions, and it did not matter that the body also engaged in commercial activity. The Electricity Board, a statutory body with power to make binding regulations, was a “State”.
Eight years later the Court went further. In Sukhdev Singh v. Bhagatram, (1975) 1 SCC 421, another five-judge bench held that the Oil and Natural Gas Commission, the Life Insurance Corporation and the Industrial Finance Corporation were all “authorities” and therefore “State”, because they were statutory corporations whose regulations carried the force of law. The lasting contribution came from Justice Mathew’s separate concurrence. He reframed the whole inquiry: the State today is not merely a coercive machinery of police and taxes, it is a service corporation, and it acts through instrumentalities and agencies. Whether a body is an “instrumentality or agency of the State”, he suggested, matters more than whether it was born from a statute. That idea, the instrumentality concept, became the seed of everything that followed.
The instrumentality indicia and the six-point test
The seed grew in Ramana Dayaram Shetty v. International Airport Authority of India, (1979) 3 SCC 489. Justice Bhagwati, writing for a three-judge bench, set out a cluster of indicia for identifying an instrumentality: the magnitude of the State’s financial assistance and whether it meets almost the entire expenditure of the body; the depth of State control over its management and policy; whether it enjoys a State-conferred or State-protected monopoly; and whether its functions are of public importance and closely related to governmental functions. None of these, he stressed, was conclusive on its own. What mattered was their cumulative effect.
Two years later the indicia were consolidated into the enumeration that lawyers still cite from memory. In Ajay Hasia v. Khalid Mujib Sehravardi, (1981) 1 SCC 722, a five-judge Constitution Bench laid down a six-point test for when a body is an instrumentality or agency of government:
- If the entire share capital of the body is held by the government, that points strongly towards it being an instrumentality.
- Where State financial assistance meets almost the entire expenditure of the body, that indicates a governmental character.
- Whether the body enjoys a monopoly status that is State-conferred or State-protected.
- The existence of deep and pervasive State control.
- Whether the functions of the body are of public importance and closely related to governmental functions.
- If a government department is transferred to the body, that is a strong factor supporting the inference of instrumentality.
The crucial holding in Ajay Hasia was not the list. It was the principle behind it: the form in which a body is clothed is irrelevant. A society registered under the Societies Registration Act (which is exactly what the body in that case was) can be as much a “State” as a statutory corporation, if the substance shows it to be an instrumentality of government. Form yields to function. That is why you cannot answer the “State” question by asking only how a body was incorporated. You can find more on how these agency principles apply in practice in our discussion of the instrumentalities of the State under Article 12.
The same functional logic soon reached government companies. In Som Prakash Rekhi v. Union of India, (1981) 1 SCC 449, the Court held that Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited, a government company, was “State”, and that a writ under Article 32 lay against it. Justice Krishna Iyer applied a substance-over-form approach, treating the company as the alter ego of the Central Government. So by the early 1980s the instrumentality doctrine covered statutory corporations, registered societies and government companies alike.
The controlling test: Pradeep Kumar Biswas (2002)
By 2002 the six-point test had a problem. It was being applied almost as a checklist, and the categories had drifted so wide that nearly any body with some government link risked being labelled a “State”. A seven-judge bench was assembled to settle the law, and the result is the judgment that controls the field today.
In Pradeep Kumar Biswas v. Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, (2002) 5 SCC 111, the Court, by a majority of five to two (Justice Ruma Pal writing for the majority), reframed the inquiry with a sharper rule. A body is a “State” under Article 12 only if it is “financially, functionally and administratively dominated by or under the control of the Government”, and that control must be “particular to the body in question and pervasive”. This is the “deep and pervasive control” test. And the bench added the qualification that has decided most cases since: “if the control is merely regulatory, whether under statute or otherwise, it would not serve to make the body a State”. No single factor is decisive. It is a cumulative judgment on the totality of the body’s relationship with government.
Applying that test, the seven judges held that the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) was a “State”, and in doing so overruled an earlier decision, Sabhajit Tewary v. Union of India (1975), which had held the opposite. CSIR failed to escape because the government’s grip on it ran deep: the Prime Minister was its ex-officio President, government funding dominated its budget, and the administrative control was thoroughgoing, not merely regulatory.
That distinction, between deep and pervasive control on one hand and mere regulation on the other, is the single most important line in the modern law. Keep it in mind, because it does almost all the work in the cases that follow.
| Case | Year | Bench | What it added to the test |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rajasthan State Electricity Board v. Mohan Lal | 1967 | 5 judges | Rejected ejusdem generis; any statutory authority with governmental functions is “State” |
| Sukhdev Singh v. Bhagatram | 1975 | 5 judges | Statutory corporations (ONGC, LIC, IFC) are “State”; the instrumentality concept introduced |
| R.D. Shetty v. International Airport Authority | 1979 | 3 judges | Cluster of instrumentality indicia; cumulative effect, not any single factor |
| Ajay Hasia v. Khalid Mujib | 1981 | 5 judges | The six-point test; form is irrelevant, a society can be “State” |
| Som Prakash Rekhi v. Union of India | 1981 | 3 judges | Extends the doctrine to government companies (BPCL) |
| Pradeep Kumar Biswas v. IICB | 2002 | 7 judges | The controlling rule: deep and pervasive control; regulatory control is not enough |
Applying the test, body by body: is it a “State”?
The doctrine is only useful when you can point it at a real body and get an answer. So here is the test applied across the categories that come up most often. The one principle to carry through all of them: ask not whether the government is involved, but whether the government dominates.
Government companies and statutory corporations
This is the easy end of the spectrum. A statutory corporation created by its own Act (the Life Insurance Corporation, the Oil and Natural Gas Commission) is a “State”, as Sukhdev Singh settled. A government company registered under the Companies Act but wholly owned and controlled by the government (Bharat Petroleum in Som Prakash Rekhi) is equally a “State”, because the corporate form does not disguise government domination. If the entire share capital is held by the government and the board answers to a ministry, the body is an instrumentality and Part III binds it.
Registered societies and research bodies
Form gives no shelter here either. A society registered under an ordinary societies-registration statute can still be a “State”, as Ajay Hasia held of the society running a government engineering college. The research bodies tell the same story: CSIR, in Pradeep Kumar Biswas, was a registered society, yet the depth of government control made it a “State”. The question is never the label on the registration certificate. It is whether the government’s financial, functional and administrative control is deep and pervasive.
Universities and schools
Public universities, set up and funded by the government, are “State” without much argument. Private universities and “deemed-to-be” universities are a different matter. As a rule they are not “State” under Article 12, because the government neither owns nor dominates them, it merely regulates them through the University Grants Commission. But (and this is the twist most students miss) that is not the end of the story. Because education is a public function, a private or deemed university can still be dragged before a High Court under Article 226 for the limited purpose of enforcing that public duty. We come back to this escape hatch in section six, but it is the reason our expelled student from the opening is not necessarily out of options.
Private companies, NBFCs and regulatory-monopoly bodies
This is where petitioners most often overreach. A private company does not become a “State” just because it operates in a regulated sector or performs a service the public relies on. The clearest illustration is cricket. In Zee Telefilms Ltd. v. Union of India, (2005) 4 SCC 649, a five-judge Constitution Bench held, by three to two, that the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is not a “State” under Article 12. BCCI is not created by statute, and the government does not financially, functionally or administratively dominate it, so it failed the Pradeep Kumar Biswas test, however powerful it may be over Indian cricket.
The same logic now reaches finance. A non-banking financial company is heavily regulated by the Reserve Bank of India, but regulation is not control. That distinction was applied cleanly in early 2025 (more on the recent cases in section seven), and it is the reason a borrower generally cannot bring a writ against a private lender. The mistake is to treat “the RBI regulates it” as if it meant “the government controls it”. It does not.
| Body | “State” under Article 12? | Anchor case | Writ route if aggrieved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Statutory corporation (LIC, ONGC) | Yes | Sukhdev Singh (1975) | Article 32 and Article 226 |
| Government company (BPCL) | Yes | Som Prakash Rekhi (1981) | Article 32 and Article 226 |
| Government-controlled society (CSIR) | Yes | Pradeep Kumar Biswas (2002) | Article 32 and Article 226 |
| Public university | Yes | Applying Ajay Hasia | Article 32 and Article 226 |
| Private / deemed university | No (but public function) | Janet Jeyapaul (2015) | Article 226 for public duties |
| BCCI | No (but public function) | Zee Telefilms (2005) | Article 226 for public duties |
| Private company / NBFC | No (mere regulation) | S. Shobha v. Muthoot Finance (2025) | Ordinary civil / statutory remedies |
Is the judiciary a “State” under Article 12?
Ask a room of law students whether the courts are a “State” under Article 12 and you will get a split verdict. The honest answer is: it depends on which hat the court is wearing.
On its administrative and rule-making side, the judiciary behaves like any other organ of the State. When a High Court frames rules, fixes the service conditions of its staff or makes administrative appointments, it exercises the kind of power that can be tested against fundamental rights. In that capacity the courts fall within Article 12.
The judicial side is treated differently. The settled position is that a judicial order of a superior court, passed in the exercise of its judicial function, is not treated as the kind of “State” action that can be attacked under Article 32 for violating a fundamental right. In Naresh Shridhar Mirajkar v. State of Maharashtra, AIR 1967 SC 1, a nine-judge bench held that a judicial order of the High Court could not be said to violate fundamental rights in a way that would found a writ petition against the court itself. The principle was reaffirmed decades later in Rupa Ashok Hurra v. Ashok Hurra, (2002) 4 SCC 388, where a five-judge bench held that a final judicial order of the Supreme Court cannot be challenged under Article 32 as breaching fundamental rights, and instead created the narrow “curative petition” as the only route to reopen such an order.
So the neat exam answer is this: the judiciary in its administrative role can be “State”; the judiciary in its judicial role is not amenable to a fundamental-rights writ over its verdicts. The remedy against a wrong judgment is an appeal or a review, not a writ against the judge.
When a body is not a “State”: the Article 226 public-function escape hatch
Here is the distinction that separates a good answer from a great one, and it is the part most guides skip entirely. Failing the Article 12 test does not always mean the courthouse door is shut. Article 32 (the Supreme Court’s writ power) is tied to fundamental rights and therefore to “State” action. But Article 226 (the High Court’s writ power) is wider. It lets a High Court issue writs to “any person or authority” for the enforcement of fundamental rights “and for any other purpose”. That last phrase is the opening.
Indian courts have read Article 226 to reach any body that discharges a public function or a public duty, even if that body is not a “State” under Article 12. So the question splits in two. Is the body a “State”? If yes, all of Part III applies and both writ courts are open. If no, a second question follows: does it perform a public function? If yes, a High Court can still issue a writ under Article 226, confined to enforcing that public duty.
Three judgments map this second track. Zee Telefilms, having held that BCCI is not a “State”, went on to hold that BCCI is nonetheless amenable to Article 226 because it discharges public functions: it regulates an entire national sport and picks the team that represents the country. So a wrongly treated cricketer or franchise is not remediless, they simply proceed under Article 226 rather than Article 32. Long before that, in Andi Mukta Sadguru Trust v. V.R. Rudani, (1989) 2 SCC 691, the Court held that a writ of mandamus can be issued to a private body, there a trust running an aided college, to enforce a public duty, and that the duty need not be created by statute. And in Janet Jeyapaul v. SRM University, (2015) 16 SCC 530, the Court held that a writ against a deemed-to-be university was maintainable under Article 226, because imparting education is a public function.
That is the lifeline for our opening student. Even if her private deemed university is not a “State”, she can still ask a High Court to quash her expulsion under Article 226, on the footing that the university performs the public function of education and owes her a duty of fair procedure.
| Article 12 “State” route | Article 226 “public function” route | |
|---|---|---|
| Trigger | Body is “State” / instrumentality | Body performs a public function or public duty |
| Forum | Supreme Court (Article 32) and High Court (Article 226) | High Court only (Article 226) |
| What you can enforce | All Part III fundamental rights | The public duty; fundamental rights only to that extent |
| Example body | LIC, ONGC, CSIR, BPCL | BCCI, private/deemed universities, aided colleges |
The 2024 to 2026 frontier: regulated is not the same as controlled
The Pradeep Kumar Biswas test is over twenty years old, but it is not gathering dust. The Supreme Court and the High Courts have been applying it briskly through 2025, and the recent cases sharpen exactly the line that trips litigants up: the difference between a body the government regulates and a body the government controls.
The clearest recent statement came from the Supreme Court in early 2025. In S. Shobha v. Muthoot Finance Ltd. (2025), decided on 24 January 2025, the Court held that Muthoot Finance, a private non-banking financial company, is not a “State” under Article 12 and is not amenable to a writ under Article 226. The reasoning is worth quoting for how flatly it draws the line: RBI guidelines, the Court said, are only regulatory measures and do not imply control. A borrower’s remedy against a private lender therefore lies in ordinary law, not in constitutional writ jurisdiction. It is Pradeep Kumar Biswas applied to the finance sector, and it confirms that heavy regulation, even by the central bank, does not convert a private company into the State.
The High Courts are reading it the same way. In Manoj Petroleum v. Union of India (2025), decided on 4 March 2025, the Allahabad High Court held that a private petroleum distributor (Nayara Energy, the former Essar Oil) was not a “State” merely because it complied with ministerial and regulatory guidelines. Absent financial, functional and administrative dominance by the government, the Court held, a private company does not become a “State”, and carrying out a public-facing activity does not by itself change that. The writ was held not maintainable and the relationship treated as contractual.
Where is the genuine open question in 2026? It concerns layered ownership. What if a company’s shares are held not by the government directly, but by other public sector undertakings? Is such a body an instrumentality of the State? That precise question is now pending before the Supreme Court. In an interim order dated 29 April 2024 in the KITCO matter, the Court stayed a Kerala High Court judgment that had held KITCO to be a “State” (on the footing that around 95% of its shares were held by government and statutory companies, with no private shareholding), issued notice, and agreed to examine whether shareholding held through PSUs, rather than by the government itself, is enough to make a company a “State”. As of mid-2026 that question remains undecided. Anyone advising on the status of a PSU-owned subsidiary should treat it as genuinely unsettled and worth watching.
The trend, though, is unmistakable. The modern courts are narrowing “State”, not widening it, wherever the government’s link to a body is regulatory or indirect rather than dominant.
The outer edge of Article 12: do fundamental rights bind private actors?
If Article 12 draws the boundary of the “State”, does that mean fundamental rights stop entirely at private conduct? Not quite. The boundary is fuzzier than the definition suggests, for two reasons.
First, a handful of fundamental rights bind private persons by their own text, no “State” required. Article 15(2) forbids any citizen being denied access to shops, restaurants, hotels and public places of entertainment, and that prohibition runs against private owners, not just the government. Article 17 abolishes untouchability and makes its practice by anyone an offence. Article 23 bans human trafficking and forced labour. Article 24 forbids the employment of children in hazardous work. These rights were deliberately written to reach private actors, because the harms they address are usually inflicted by private actors.
Second, the Supreme Court has begun to extend even the classic “against the State” rights into the private sphere. In Kaushal Kishore v. State of Uttar Pradesh, (2023) 4 SCC 1, a five-judge Constitution Bench held, by four to one, that a fundamental right under Article 19 or Article 21 can be enforced even against persons and entities other than the State or its instrumentalities. In other words, the horizontal application of these rights is now recognised, at least in some circumstances, though Justice Nagarathna dissented and would have left the matter to Parliament. The same Court also confirmed that the grounds for restricting free speech in Article 19(2) are exhaustive, so no extra restriction can be smuggled in.
What does this mean for the “State” question? It means Article 12 is the gateway to the bulk of fundamental-rights litigation, but it is not the absolute outer limit of fundamental-rights protection. A claim that fails because the respondent is not a “State” may still find a foothold, either in one of the self-executing articles or, increasingly, in the horizontal reach the Court recognised in Kaushal Kishore. This is a live and developing area, and it rewards close attention. Our explainer on the right to equality traces how far the equality code itself extends.
Common mistakes when arguing the “State” question
The doctrine is settled enough that most losses at the threshold come from avoidable errors, not hard cases. A few recur often enough to be worth naming.
The first is treating government funding as if it settled the question. It doesn’t. Plenty of bodies receive grants, subsidies or contracts without being dominated by the government, and Pradeep Kumar Biswas is explicit that the control must be deep and pervasive, not merely a funding relationship. The second, and the costliest in 2025, is confusing “regulated by” with “controlled by”. Muthoot Finance is the cautionary tale: an entire sector can sit under a regulator’s rulebook and still be entirely private.
The third mistake is forgetting the Article 226 route when Article 12 fails. Lawyers who frame the whole case around “this body is a State” and lose that point sometimes walk away, when the far better argument was that the body performs a public function and answers to a writ under Article 226 regardless. The fourth is assuming that a powerful or monopolistic body must be a “State”; BCCI is the standing rebuttal. And the fifth is applying the six-point test as a mechanical checklist, ticking boxes, when the Supreme Court has said plainly that it is a cumulative judgment about domination and control, weighing the whole picture together. Is the government pulling the strings, or merely writing the rules? Answer that honestly and you will usually predict the result.
Frequently asked questions
What is the “State” under Article 12 of the Constitution?
Article 12 defines “the State”, for the purposes of Part III (fundamental rights), to include the Government and Parliament of India, the Government and Legislature of every State, all local authorities, and “other authorities” within India or under the control of the Government of India. It is an inclusive definition, so courts can bring new kinds of bodies within it if they function as instrumentalities of the State.
What does “other authorities” mean in Article 12?
“Other authorities” is the open-ended fourth limb of Article 12 that the courts use to bring non-obvious bodies (statutory corporations, government companies, government-controlled societies) within the “State”. A body qualifies if it is an instrumentality or agency of the government, judged today by the “deep and pervasive control” test from Pradeep Kumar Biswas v. Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (2002).
What is the instrumentality or agency test?
It is the test for deciding whether a body that is not obviously part of the government is nonetheless a “State”. Ajay Hasia (1981) set out six indicators, including full government shareholding, near-total government funding, State-conferred monopoly, deep and pervasive control, public functions closely related to government, and the transfer of a government department to the body. Pradeep Kumar Biswas (2002) later held these must be applied cumulatively, and that merely regulatory control is not enough.
Is BCCI a “State” under Article 12?
No. In Zee Telefilms Ltd. v. Union of India (2005), a five-judge bench held, three to two, that the Board of Control for Cricket in India is not a “State”, because it is not statutorily created and the government does not dominate it. However, because BCCI performs public functions, it can still be taken to a High Court by a writ under Article 226.
Is a private company a “State” under Article 12?
Generally no. A private company is not a “State” simply because it operates in a regulated sector or serves the public. In S. Shobha v. Muthoot Finance Ltd. (2025), the Supreme Court held that a private non-banking financial company is not a “State” and not amenable to a writ, noting that RBI regulation does not amount to government control.
Is a private or deemed university a “State” under Article 12?
Usually not, because the government regulates such universities through the UGC rather than controlling them. But a private or deemed-to-be university can still be taken to a High Court under Article 226, because imparting education is a public function. Janet Jeyapaul v. SRM University (2015) confirmed that a writ against a deemed university is maintainable on that basis.
Is CSIR a “State” under Article 12?
Yes. In Pradeep Kumar Biswas v. Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (2002), a seven-judge bench held that the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research is a “State”, because it is financially, functionally and administratively dominated by the government. That decision overruled the earlier Sabhajit Tewary ruling, which had held the opposite.
Is a cooperative society a “State” under Article 12?
It depends on the degree of government control. A cooperative society is not a “State” merely because it is registered under a cooperative-societies law or subject to statutory regulation. It becomes a “State” only if the government’s financial, functional and administrative control over it is deep and pervasive, applying the Pradeep Kumar Biswas test.
Is the judiciary a “State” under Article 12?
Partly. In its administrative and rule-making capacity, the judiciary is a “State” and its actions can be tested against fundamental rights. But a judicial order of a superior court is not treated as “State” action that can be challenged under Article 32 for violating fundamental rights, as held in Naresh Shridhar Mirajkar (1967) and reaffirmed in Rupa Ashok Hurra (2002).
Can I file a writ against a private body?
Sometimes. You cannot bring a writ under Article 32 against a purely private body, because Article 32 is tied to “State” action. But you may bring a writ under Article 226 in a High Court against a private body that performs a public function or a public duty, as established in Andi Mukta Sadguru Trust v. V.R. Rudani (1989).
What is the difference between Article 12 and Article 226 for writs?
Article 12 defines the “State” and controls access to fundamental-rights remedies, including the Supreme Court’s writ jurisdiction under Article 32. Article 226 is wider: a High Court can issue writs to “any person or authority” for “any other purpose”, which lets it reach even non-State bodies that discharge public functions, though only to enforce that public duty.
Does Article 12 apply to all fundamental rights?
Article 12 defines the “State” for all of Part III, so it governs the rights that run against the State (such as Articles 14, 19 and 21). But a few fundamental rights, such as Articles 15(2), 17, 23 and 24, bind private persons by their own terms and do not depend on a body being a “State”.
What did Pradeep Kumar Biswas decide?
The seven-judge bench laid down the controlling test for “other authorities”: a body is a “State” only if it is financially, functionally and administratively dominated by, or under the deep and pervasive control of, the government, and mere regulatory control is not enough. It applied this to hold CSIR a “State” and overruled the earlier Sabhajit Tewary decision.
Is a government company a “State” under Article 12?
Yes, where the government owns and controls it. In Som Prakash Rekhi v. Union of India (1981), the Supreme Court held that Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited, a government company, was a “State”, because the corporate form did not hide the government’s domination. A government company held and controlled by the State is an instrumentality bound by fundamental rights.
Are fundamental rights enforceable against private individuals?
To a growing extent, yes. Certain articles (15(2), 17, 23, 24) bind private persons directly. And in Kaushal Kishore v. State of Uttar Pradesh (2023), a five-judge bench held, four to one, that rights under Articles 19 and 21 can be enforced even against non-State actors in some circumstances, recognising the horizontal application of these rights.
References
Case law
- Ajay Hasia v. Khalid Mujib Sehravardi, (1981) 1 SCC 722 (AIR 1981 SC 487)
- Andi Mukta Sadguru Trust v. V.R. Rudani, (1989) 2 SCC 691 (AIR 1989 SC 1607)
- Janet Jeyapaul v. SRM University, (2015) 16 SCC 530 (2015 SCC OnLine SC 1321)
- Kaushal Kishore v. State of Uttar Pradesh, (2023) 4 SCC 1 (2023 INSC 4)
- Naresh Shridhar Mirajkar v. State of Maharashtra, AIR 1967 SC 1 ((1966) 3 SCR 744, nine-judge bench)
- Pradeep Kumar Biswas v. Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, (2002) 5 SCC 111 (AIR 2002 SC 1877, seven-judge bench)
- Rajasthan State Electricity Board v. Mohan Lal, (1967) 3 SCR 377 (AIR 1967 SC 1857)
- Ramana Dayaram Shetty v. International Airport Authority of India, (1979) 3 SCC 489 (AIR 1979 SC 1628)
- Rupa Ashok Hurra v. Ashok Hurra, (2002) 4 SCC 388 (AIR 2002 SC 1771)
- Som Prakash Rekhi v. Union of India, (1981) 1 SCC 449 (AIR 1981 SC 212)
- Sukhdev Singh v. Bhagatram, (1975) 1 SCC 421 (AIR 1975 SC 1331)
- Zee Telefilms Ltd. v. Union of India, (2005) 4 SCC 649 (AIR 2005 SC 2677)
- S. Shobha v. Muthoot Finance Ltd., 2025 INSC 117 (Supreme Court, 24 January 2025)
- Manoj Petroleum v. Union of India, 2025 SCC OnLine All 1309 (Allahabad High Court, 4 March 2025)
Constitution
- Article 12, Constitution of India: definition of “the State” for Part III
Disclaimer: This article is for general informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. The law on Article 12 continues to develop, and its application depends on the specific facts of each case. Readers should consult a qualified advocate before acting on any matter concerning fundamental rights, writ jurisdiction, or the status of a particular body as a “State”.
