TL;DR: In 2023 the Union government amended the IT Rules to let it set up a Fact Check Unit (FCU) that could flag online content about “the business of the central government” as fake, false, or misleading. Once flagged, intermediaries like X, Facebook, and YouTube had to act on the content or risk losing their safe-harbour immunity. Comedian Kunal Kamra, the Editors Guild of India, and others challenged the amendment in the Bombay High Court. A Division Bench split on 31 January 2024, with Justice G.S. Patel striking it down and Justice Neela Gokhale upholding it. The tie-breaker judge, Justice A.S. Chandurkar, delivered his opinion on 20 September 2024, holding the rule unconstitutional. On 26 September 2024 a fresh bench formally struck down the amendment by a 2:1 majority for violating Articles 14, 19(1)(a), and 19(1)(g), and for the chilling effect recognised in Shreya Singhal. The Supreme Court has since agreed to hear the Centre’s appeal but has refused to stay the verdict.

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What the Fact Check Unit amendment actually did

The case began with a small change in rule text that carried very large consequences. In April 2023 the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology notified the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2023, which inserted new wording into Rule 3(1)(b)(v) of the parent IT Rules of 2021.

The amended rule required intermediaries to make reasonable efforts to prevent users from hosting or sharing information that, “in respect of any business of the Central Government”, a Fact Check Unit notified by the government had identified as “fake or false or misleading”. The unit was to be a body of the central government’s own choosing. There was no independent oversight, no judicial member, and no statutory definition of “fake”, “false”, or “misleading”.

To understand why this mattered, you have to follow the chain of consequences. An intermediary, in plain terms, is the platform that carries other people’s content. Under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, 2000, an intermediary enjoys “safe harbour”: it is not legally liable for third-party content as long as it observes due diligence and acts on lawful notice. Safe harbour is the foundation on which platforms operate. Without it, every post, comment, and video becomes a potential lawsuit aimed at the platform rather than the author.

The 2023 amendment tied the FCU’s flag directly to that immunity. As the analysis in Lakshmikumaran and Sridharan’s note on the judgment explains, once the FCU marked a piece of content as fake or misleading, an intermediary that did not take it down or disable it risked losing the protection of Section 79. The choice put to platforms was stark. Remove the flagged content, or face liability for everything on the service.

That is the mechanism the courts had to weigh. Not a polite request to correct the record, but a government-run body whose say-so could strip a platform of its legal shield unless it complied.

The government’s stated purpose was to curb misinformation about its own work. The unit was modelled on the existing fact-check function of the Press Information Bureau, and the Centre argued that false claims about its schemes and policies could cause real harm. The petitioners did not dispute that misinformation exists. They disputed who gets to decide what is false, and what happens to speech once the state decides.

It helps to be precise about the scope of the rule, because the government repeatedly described it as narrow. On paper it applied only to information “in respect of any business of the central government”. But “business of the central government” is itself an open-ended phrase. Almost any matter of public policy, from welfare schemes to defence procurement to the conduct of ministries, can be described as the business of the central government. A rule that reaches that far is not narrow in any meaningful sense. It touches the heart of political debate, which is exactly the kind of speech that constitutional protection exists to shield.

The rule also gave the government two roles at once. The central government would decide what its own business was, notify a unit staffed by its own choosing, and let that unit decide what statements about its business were false. The same party that the speech criticised would judge the speech. That structural problem, the absence of any independent decision-maker, sat at the centre of the petitioners’ case and at the centre of the court’s eventual reasoning.

Why Kamra and the press challenged it

The lead petitioner was the political satirist Kunal Kamra. His work depends on commentary about the government, often sharp and often unflattering. A rule that let a government body brand statements about the government as false, with platform takedowns to follow, struck directly at the kind of speech he produces.

Kamra was not alone. He was joined by the Editors Guild of India, the Association of Indian Magazines, and others representing the press and digital publishers. The Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital-rights group, tracked and supported the challenge throughout. The breadth of the coalition mattered: this was not a single comedian objecting to a rule, but a cross-section of journalists, publishers, and rights advocates arguing that the amendment threatened the basic conditions for public debate.

Their core argument ran along three lines.

First, the amendment violated Article 19(1)(a), the freedom of speech and expression, because it let the state act as judge in its own cause over speech that criticised it. The restriction did not fit within the limited grounds of Article 19(2), which lists the only permissible reasons for restricting speech, such as public order, decency, or defamation. “Fake or misleading information about the government” is not one of those grounds.

Second, it violated Article 19(1)(g), the freedom to practise any profession or carry on any trade or business, because intermediaries and content creators would have to alter or remove lawful work to keep operating.

Third, it violated Article 14, the guarantee of equality, because the rule was vague and arbitrary, gave no clear standard, and treated online speech about the government differently from the same speech in print or in person.

Running through all three was a single concern that constitutional lawyers call the chilling effect: the tendency of a vague, government-controlled speech restriction to make people self-censor well beyond what the rule actually forbids, simply to stay safe. That concept would become central to how the case was decided.

The split verdict of January 2024

The petitions were heard by a Division Bench of the Bombay High Court made up of Justice G.S. Patel and Justice Neela Gokhale. On 31 January 2024 the bench delivered a split verdict, with the two judges reaching opposite conclusions.

Justice Patel struck down the amendment. He held that the rule was an unconstitutional restriction on free speech. He read the amendment as targeting expression itself rather than merely false information, and found that it failed the tests laid down for any valid speech restriction. In his analysis the rule was overbroad, lacked safeguards, and would chill protected speech.

Justice Patel made a point that became one of the most quoted lines in the whole saga. He asked, in effect, who fact-checks the fact checkers, and who decides whether the FCU’s own view is itself fake, false, or misleading. The question exposed the circularity at the core of the design. A unit set up by the government to label statements about the government as false has no check above it within the rule. Its verdict triggers consequences for platforms, but there is no independent body to test whether the verdict was right. The only recourse, going to court after the fact, comes too late to undo the chilling effect. Justice Patel also drew a careful distinction: some categories of false speech, such as defamation, hate speech, or incendiary fake news that threatens public order, can be restricted because they connect to a recognised ground in Article 19(2). But falsity on its own, untethered from any of those grounds, is not a basis on which speech can be restricted at all.

Justice Gokhale upheld the amendment. She accepted much of the government’s framing, treating the rule as a measured response to a genuine problem of misinformation, and read the safeguards and the right of appeal as enough to save it. In her view the rule did not, on its face, suppress legitimate criticism.

A split verdict does not settle the law. When a two-judge bench divides, the Indian procedure is to refer the point to a third judge, who hears the matter afresh on the questions in dispute and whose opinion then forms the majority with whichever of the original judges agreed with it. The case was accordingly referred to a third judge, Justice A.S. Chandurkar.

The detailed academic treatment of the split on the Constitutional Law and Philosophy blog set out how far apart the two opinions were, not just in outcome but in their basic approach to what the rule was doing. For practitioners, the split was a preview of the constitutional questions the tie-breaker would have to answer.

While the matter was pending, the Centre moved to notify the unit. The Press Information Bureau’s fact-check body was notified as the FCU in March 2024. The Supreme Court promptly stayed that notification, observing that the rule raised a serious constitutional question about its impact on the freedom of speech and expression. The unit therefore never began operating. The constitutional question stayed live, and it now rested with Justice Chandurkar.

The tie-breaker judgment

Justice Chandurkar delivered his opinion on 20 September 2024, siding with the petitioners and with Justice Patel. He held that the amended Rule 3(1)(b)(v) was unconstitutional and liable to be struck down.

Because the original bench had been reconstituted by then, the formal order followed a few days later. On 26 September 2024 a bench of Justice A.S. Gadkari, sitting in place of the retired Justice Patel, and Justice Neela Gokhale, gave effect to Justice Chandurkar’s opinion and struck down the amendment by a 2:1 majority. The dates matter here, and they are easy to confuse: the split was 31 January 2024, the tie-breaker opinion was 20 September 2024, and the final order quashing the rule was 26 September 2024.

Justice Chandurkar’s reasoning is the heart of the case. He held that the amendment violated three constitutional articles at once: Article 14 (equality), Article 19(1)(a) (free speech), and Article 19(1)(g) (freedom of profession and trade). He found the expressions “fake”, “false”, and “misleading” to be vague and undefined, leaving intermediaries and users with no clear line between permitted and forbidden speech.

He held that the rule failed the test of proportionality, a doctrine that asks whether a restriction on a right is suited to its purpose, necessary, and balanced against the harm it causes. A measure can pursue a legitimate aim and still be struck down if it goes further than needed or imposes a disproportionate burden. The FCU framework, he found, did exactly that. It was overbroad, it lacked adequate safeguards, and it carried a real potential to chill protected speech.

The Constitutional Law and Philosophy analysis of the tie-breaker calls the judgment a careful application of free-speech doctrine rather than a sweeping pronouncement, anchoring each conclusion to established tests rather than rhetoric. That restraint is part of why the judgment has been read as durable.

Article 19 and the Shreya Singhal line

The single most important strand of the judgment runs back to Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015), the case that struck down Section 66A of the IT Act. That section had criminalised “grossly offensive” or “menacing” online messages, and the Supreme Court found it unconstitutional precisely because those words were vague and overbroad, and because their vagueness chilled speech that was perfectly legal.

Justice Chandurkar drew the parallel directly. As Medianama reported, he noted that the chilling effect had already been considered in Shreya Singhal, and he applied that reasoning to the FCU amendment. The logic is the same in both cases. When a speech restriction is written in undefined terms and enforced by a body whose decisions can cost a platform its legal protection, people stop short of the line out of caution. They avoid not just what is actually banned, but anything that might be mistaken for it.

This is why the chilling-effect doctrine does so much work. A rule can look narrow on paper and still suppress a wide field of lawful speech in practice, because the people affected cannot predict how it will be applied and cannot afford to find out. Shreya Singhal established that Indian free-speech law looks at the real-world effect of a restriction, not only its formal text. The Fact Check Unit judgment extended that principle from criminal liability for users to civil-liability pressure on platforms, and reached the same destination.

The court also held that the restriction did not fall within Article 19(2). The grounds on which speech can be restricted in India are an exhaustive list, and “information that the government considers fake or misleading about its own business” is not among them. A restriction that cannot be brought within Article 19(2) cannot stand, however worthy its stated aim.

This point deserves emphasis because it is often misunderstood. Article 19(2) permits restrictions on speech only on specified grounds: the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, decency or morality, contempt of court, defamation, and incitement to an offence. The list is closed. The legislature cannot add a new ground simply because a particular kind of speech seems undesirable. As the court analysed in the Saikrishna and Associates note on the judgment, the FCU rule tried to restrict speech on the ground that it was false or misleading about the government, which is not on the list. A category of harmful false speech might overlap with a listed ground, for example a false statement that incites violence connects to public order, or a false statement that ruins a reputation connects to defamation. But the FCU rule did not require any such connection. It restricted falsity as falsity. That is the constitutional defect that no amount of procedural safeguard could repair.

Two further doctrinal points reinforced the result. First, the court treated the loss of safe harbour as a restriction on the speaker’s rights, not merely a regulation of the platform. The user whose post is removed loses the audience for that post, even though the user is never heard before the FCU. The right at stake belongs to the speaker, and the rule burdened it without giving the speaker any say. Second, the court was alert to the difference between content the state may regulate and content the state merely dislikes. Satire, parody, opinion, and political criticism are protected even when they are exaggerated or unfair. A rule that lets the state strip such speech of its reach, on the bare assertion that it is misleading, collapses the line between regulating genuine harm and policing dissent.

Proportionality and the safeguards that were missing

Even a restriction with a legitimate purpose must clear the proportionality bar. The government argued that the rule had safeguards: an FCU notice was not the last word, intermediaries could choose to add a disclaimer rather than remove content, and a person aggrieved by a takedown could go to court.

Justice Chandurkar found these safeguards thin. As summarised in the Constitutional Law and Philosophy guest analysis, a mere right of appeal does not cure a rule that is vague at its core. By the time a user reaches a court, the speech has already been taken down or throttled, the chilling effect has already operated, and the burden of restoring the speech has been shifted onto the speaker rather than the state.

The deeper problem the Mondaq analysis of Section 79 identifies is the structural incentive the rule created. An intermediary whose entire business rests on safe harbour will do almost anything to keep it. Faced with an FCU flag and the threat of losing immunity for all content on the platform, the rational move is to comply at once, even where the flag is questionable. The rule did not have to order removals directly. It simply made removal the safe choice and let commercial self-interest do the rest. That is precisely the kind of indirect pressure on speech that proportionality analysis is designed to catch.

The judgment also weighed the discrimination point. The same factual claim about the government, made on a social media platform, could be flagged and stripped of protection. Made in a newspaper or a public speech, it could not. The rule singled out online intermediaries for a burden that did not apply to other media, and the court found no rational basis for that distinction strong enough to survive Article 14.

No fundamental right to truth held by the government

One observation in the judgment captured a principle that runs deeper than the specific rule. The state does not hold a fundamental right to have only the truth, as it defines truth, circulate about itself.

This may sound obvious, but it answers the government’s strongest emotional argument. The Centre framed the FCU as a shield against lies about its work, as though false claims about government schemes were an injury the state was entitled to prevent. The court’s response was that controlling what is said about the government is not a constitutional value the state can assert against its citizens. Citizens hold the right to speak, including the right to be wrong, to exaggerate, to satirise, and to criticise. The government does not hold a countervailing right to be spoken about accurately.

There are existing remedies for genuinely harmful falsehoods. Defamation law, both civil and criminal, already addresses false statements that damage reputation. Specific statutes cover specific harms. What the Constitution does not permit is a general power, vested in the state, to decide which statements about itself are true and to penalise the rest through platform takedowns. As the Verfassungsblog commentary on the judgment put it, the court declined to let the executive install itself as the arbiter of truth in public debate about its own conduct.

Justice Chandurkar put the principle in formal terms. He held that the right to freedom of speech and expression does not carry within it a right to the truth, and it does not place a corresponding duty on the state to ensure that citizens receive only information that the Fact Check Unit has not marked as fake, false, or misleading. Read carefully, that holding does two things at once. It denies the existence of a state-held interest in controlling the accuracy of speech about itself, and it denies that citizens have a right to be protected from falsehood by the government. Both halves matter. The first stops the state from claiming a constitutional warrant for the FCU. The second stops the argument that the rule was really for the citizens’ benefit, a protective measure rather than a censorial one.

The deeper worry the judgment addresses is the asymmetry of the arrangement. In an ordinary defamation case, two private parties contest a statement before a neutral court, and the burden, the standard, and the remedy are all defined by law. Under the FCU rule, the government was complainant, fact-finder, and beneficiary, and the platform was conscripted as the enforcement arm under threat to its immunity. That is not a dispute resolved by a neutral forum. It is a determination made by an interested party with the power to impose consequences. The Constitution’s structure assumes that when the state restricts speech, it does so through law that is precise, that fits a recognised ground, and that can be tested by an independent court. The FCU rule short-circuited all three assumptions.

This framing is why the case resonates beyond its facts. It is not only about one rule or one set of platforms. It is about who, in a constitutional democracy, gets to decide what counts as true in political speech, and the answer the court gave is not the government.

What it means for intermediaries and users

For intermediaries, the immediate effect is relief from a specific and serious pressure. The FCU mechanism that threatened safe harbour over government-related content is gone, and the unit never operated because of the earlier Supreme Court stay. Platforms are not obliged to act on a government fact-check flag to keep their Section 79 protection.

That said, the judgment does not dismantle the broader machinery of intermediary regulation. The parent IT Rules of 2021 remain in force. Platforms still have grievance-redressal duties, content-moderation obligations, and the general due-diligence requirements under Section 79. The AZB note on the decision is careful to point out that what fell was the specific FCU amendment, not the regulatory framework as a whole. Compliance teams should read the judgment narrowly: it removes one obligation, it does not rewrite the rest.

For users and creators, the practical gain is space. Commentary, criticism, and satire about the government’s work no longer sit under the threat of a government body flagging them as false and triggering a takedown to protect the platform’s immunity. For journalists, the win is the removal of a tool that could have been used to pressure reporting on government schemes and policies.

Two cautions are worth keeping in mind. First, the protection is specific to this rule. Other levers of content control, including emergency blocking powers under Section 69A of the IT Act and the general takedown regime, are untouched by this judgment. Second, the matter is not finally settled, because the Centre has gone to the Supreme Court.

If you ever need to assert your own speech or challenge a state action that restricts it, the constitutional remedy lies in the High Court’s writ jurisdiction. Our explainers on how to file a writ petition and on the scope of Article 226 in India’s High Courts walk through the practical and constitutional steps involved.

The wider free-speech stakes

The Fact Check Unit case sits in a line of decisions that have repeatedly pushed back against vague, executive-driven controls on online speech. Shreya Singhal struck down Section 66A. The Supreme Court stayed the FCU notification. The Bombay High Court then struck down the amendment that created the unit. Each step reaffirms a consistent idea: speech restrictions must be precise, must fit within Article 19(2), and must not place the executive in the role of deciding truth.

The stakes are not abstract. India has one of the largest populations of internet users in the world, and a vast share of public debate now happens on platforms governed by intermediary law. A rule that lets the state flag content about itself and pressure platforms to remove it does not affect a narrow class of professional dissidents. It affects everyone who posts about a government scheme, a policy failure, or a public controversy. The breadth of the petitioner coalition, from a comedian to the Editors Guild, reflected how widely the rule reached.

The case also illustrates a structural feature of modern censorship pressure. The state need not censor directly. It can regulate the intermediary, attach a cost to non-compliance, and let the platform’s commercial incentives produce the removals. Courts that look only at the formal text of such rules will miss the effect. The strength of this judgment is that it looked at the mechanism, traced the incentive, and named the chilling effect for what it was.

For practitioners and citizens watching the regulation of digital speech, the case is a reference point. It confirms that the chilling-effect doctrine applies to platform-pressure rules, that proportionality is a real and demanding test, and that the government does not hold a right to control the narrative about itself. Those principles will shape how the next wave of internet-speech rules is drafted and litigated.

There is also a lesson here for how rules of this kind are best challenged. The petitioners did not rest on slogans about free speech. They built a precise constitutional case: the rule did not fit Article 19(2), it failed proportionality, it discriminated against online media under Article 14, and it produced a chilling effect that prior precedent had already condemned. Each limb was argued on its own and supported by authority. That is why the judgment reads as a methodical application of doctrine rather than a political statement, and it is why the reasoning is likely to hold up on appeal. For anyone drafting a challenge to a speech-restricting rule, the TechPolicy.Press analysis of the decision is a useful map of how the arguments were structured and why they landed.

What happens next: the Supreme Court appeal

The Bombay High Court judgment is not the final word, because the Union government has appealed it to the Supreme Court.

In its petition before the Supreme Court, the Centre argued that clear guidelines are needed to deal with misinformation, and that the High Court erred in striking down the amendment. The government’s position is that misinformation about its work causes real harm and that the FCU was a proportionate response.

In March 2026 the Supreme Court agreed to examine the appeal. A three-judge bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant issued notice to Kunal Kamra, the Editors Guild, the Association of Indian Magazines, and the other respondents, asking them to file responses within four weeks. Critically, the court refused to stay the Bombay High Court verdict. That means the amendment remains struck down and inoperative while the appeal is heard. The Fact Check Unit cannot function in the meantime.

So the legal position as it stands is settled but not final. The amendment is dead for now, the unit cannot operate, and the constitutional principles laid down by the Bombay High Court hold the field. Whether they survive in full will depend on how the Supreme Court reads the same questions of vagueness, proportionality, and the chilling effect. Given the consistency of the Section 66A and FCU-stay precedents, the petitioners begin with the wind at their backs, but an appeal of this importance is genuinely open.

For corporates and platforms, the appeal creates a planning question rather than a present obligation. Because the verdict has not been stayed, there is nothing to comply with today: the FCU does not exist, and no government fact-check flag carries the safe-harbour consequence the rule once attached to it. But a Supreme Court that has agreed to examine the question could, in principle, restore some version of the framework, or lay down the “clear guidelines” the Centre says are needed. Sensible compliance teams will watch the appeal without acting on it, and will keep the rest of their intermediary obligations under the 2021 Rules firmly in place, since those were never in issue.

The dispute is also part of a broader, continuing contest over online speech. Kamra has separately challenged the government’s Sahyog portal, another mechanism connected to content takedowns, in the Bombay High Court. The fight over who controls speech on Indian platforms is far from over, and the Fact Check Unit judgment is likely to be cited on both sides of whatever comes next.

How Niyam helps

Reading a constitutional judgment like the Fact Check Unit case means holding several threads at once: the rule text, the procedural history of a split and a tie-breaker, the Article 19 doctrine, the Shreya Singhal line, and the proportionality test. Doing that across dozens of cases, for every matter you handle, is where most of a litigator’s time goes.

Niyam is an AI legal research assistant built for Indian law. You can ask it how a court applied the chilling-effect doctrine, pull the holdings on Rule 3(1)(b)(v) and Section 79, trace how Shreya Singhal has been followed in later judgments, or surface High Court decisions on intermediary liability, with citations you can verify against the source. It is designed to cut the time between a question and a grounded, citation-backed answer.

You can start for ₹100 and put it to work on your own research the same day. To keep current on what the higher courts are deciding, see our running coverage in the Supreme Court this month, and for the data-protection rules that sit alongside the IT framework, see our explainer on the DPDP Rules 2025.

Timeline of the Fact Check Unit case

DateEvent
April 2023Centre notifies the IT Amendment Rules 2023, amending Rule 3(1)(b)(v) to create the Fact Check Unit
2023Kunal Kamra, the Editors Guild of India, and others file petitions in the Bombay High Court
31 January 2024Division Bench splits: Justice G.S. Patel strikes the rule down, Justice Neela Gokhale upholds it
March 2024Centre notifies the PIB Fact Check Unit as the FCU
March 2024Supreme Court stays the FCU notification; the unit never begins operating
20 September 2024Tie-breaker judge Justice A.S. Chandurkar holds the amendment unconstitutional
26 September 2024Reconstituted bench formally strikes down the amendment by a 2:1 majority
March 2026Supreme Court agrees to hear the Centre’s appeal, issues notice, but refuses to stay the verdict

Frequently asked questions

What was the Fact Check Unit under the IT Rules?

The Fact Check Unit, or FCU, was a body the central government empowered itself to set up under a 2023 amendment to the IT Rules of 2021. It could identify online content about “the business of the central government” as fake, false, or misleading. Once it flagged content, intermediaries such as X, Facebook, and YouTube had to act on it or risk losing the safe-harbour protection that shields them from liability for user content under Section 79 of the IT Act.

Who challenged the Fact Check Unit, and why?

The lead petitioner was the political satirist Kunal Kamra, joined by the Editors Guild of India, the Association of Indian Magazines, and others, with support from the Internet Freedom Foundation. They argued the amendment violated the freedom of speech under Article 19(1)(a), the freedom of profession under Article 19(1)(g), and the equality guarantee under Article 14, and that it let the government act as judge in its own cause over speech about itself.

What did the Bombay High Court hold?

The Bombay High Court struck the amendment down as unconstitutional. After a split verdict on 31 January 2024, the tie-breaker judge Justice A.S. Chandurkar held on 20 September 2024 that the rule violated Articles 14, 19(1)(a), and 19(1)(g), failed the proportionality test, was vague and overbroad, and would chill protected speech. A fresh bench formally quashed the rule by a 2:1 majority on 26 September 2024.

Why was the verdict described as a split and a tie-breaker?

The first bench of two judges disagreed: one struck the rule down and the other upheld it. Under Indian procedure, when a two-judge bench splits, the disputed questions go to a third judge whose opinion forms the majority. Justice Chandurkar was that third judge, and his opinion against the rule combined with Justice Patel’s earlier view to produce the 2:1 majority that struck the amendment down.

How does Shreya Singhal relate to this case?

Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) struck down Section 66A of the IT Act because its vague, overbroad wording chilled lawful online speech. Justice Chandurkar applied the same chilling-effect reasoning to the Fact Check Unit. He held that a vague speech restriction enforced through the threat of losing safe harbour makes platforms and users self-censor far beyond what the rule actually forbids, which is the harm Shreya Singhal had already condemned.

Does the government have a right to control what is said about it?

No. The judgment recognised that the state does not hold a fundamental right to have only its version of the truth circulate about itself. Citizens hold the right to speak, criticise, and satirise the government. Genuinely harmful falsehoods can be addressed through existing law such as defamation, but the Constitution does not allow the executive to install itself as the arbiter of truth in public debate about its own conduct.

Is the Fact Check Unit case finally settled?

Not finally. The Union government has appealed to the Supreme Court, which in March 2026 agreed to hear the matter and issued notice to the respondents. Importantly, the court refused to stay the Bombay High Court verdict, so the amendment remains struck down and the unit cannot operate while the appeal is pending. The outcome will turn on how the Supreme Court reads vagueness, proportionality, and the chilling effect.