On a grey afternoon in August 2013, Harish Rana, an engineering student, slipped from the fourth floor of his paying guest accommodation in Chandigarh. The accident left him in a permanent vegetative state, dependent on life supporting equipment. That split-second event gave rise to a 13-year legal battle.
On March 11, 2026, the Supreme Court of India delivered alandmark judgment, allowing Harish Rana’s family’s plea to withdraw the feeding tubes keeping him alive, giving effect for the first time to the constitutional right to die with dignity recognised way back in 2018.
A bench of Justice JB Pardiwala and Justice KV Viswanathan directed that Rana be shifted to the palliative care ward of AIIMS New Delhi, where a medical board would oversee the withdrawal of his clinically administered nutrition with the care owed to any human being in their final passage.
It was a culmination of a process that began with the Aruna Ramchandra Shanbaug case, which first prompted India to confront what it means to prolong a life that has, in every meaningful sense, already ended.
Remembering Aruna Shanbaug, the nurse who spent 42 years in coma in KEM Hospital after a sexual assault. For 42 years, the nurses of KEM, Mumbai cared for and nursed her,...
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