Rachana Gangu v. Union of India (2026): a no-fault compensation policy for COVID-19 vaccine injuries

The facts in brief

The petitions were brought by families of individuals who allegedly died following COVID-19 vaccination. The deceased had developed severe complications in the period after they were immunised — the reported causes including intracranial bleeding, thrombocytopenia, thrombotic thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), and autoimmune encephalitis. For the families, these were not abstract risks but bereavements, and the litigation grew out of the felt impossibility of obtaining either an explanation or a remedy through ordinary channels.

What the petitioners sought was modest in form and large in implication. They asked for three things: an independent expert medical board to investigate vaccine-related deaths; enhanced transparency in the reporting of adverse events following immunisation (AEFI); and compensation. Behind these prayers lay a structural complaint — that a person injured or killed by a vaccine administered in the course of a mass public-health campaign is left to prove negligence in a field of dense medical causation, with no settled mechanism to turn to.

The matter came before a Division Bench of Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Sandeep Mehta. The petitioners were represented by Senior Advocate Colin Gonsalves; the Union of India by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta.

The question(s)

Two questions framed the Court's task. The first was institutional: should the Court direct the creation of a fresh, independent expert committee to investigate deaths said to follow vaccination, parallel to the bodies that already exist? The second was constitutional: does the State owe a positive duty — and if so, of what content — to those who suffer grave injury from a vaccine it has urged or required the population to receive?

The two questions pull in different directions. The first invites the Court into the design of medical-investigative machinery, a domain where it has reason to be cautious. The second engages Article 21, where the Court has long been willing to read affirmative obligations into the guarantee of life. How the Bench reconciled them is the substance of the decision.

What the Court held

On the first question the Court declined the relief sought. It refused to direct the constitution of a new, parallel expert committee, holding that the existing National and State AEFI Committees were adequate to the investigative task. The machinery to examine individual adverse events, in the Court's view, already existed; what was wanting lay elsewhere.

On the second question the Court held that the State bears an affirmative duty under Article 21 to put in place a structured framework for redressing serious vaccine injuries. Surveying the position, the Court observed that India does not appear to have in place any uniform or structured policy mechanism for such redress — and it was that absence, rather than any defect in the investigation of particular cases, that the constitutional guarantee reached.

From that premise the Court issued forward-looking directions rather than findings of fault. It directed the Centre to formulate a "no-fault" compensation policy for serious adverse events following COVID-19 immunisation; to ensure transparent public disclosure of relevant data; and to keep the existing surveillance mechanisms functioning efficiently. Crucially, the Court did not find vaccine-maker liability or negligence. The relief was the framing of policy, not the attribution of blame — a remedy directed at the architecture of redress rather than at any defendant's conduct.

analysis

The decision is best understood by what it withholds as much as by what it grants. The Court refused the most assertive prayer — a court-mandated parallel committee — and in doing so kept itself out of the design of medical-investigative bodies, a field of technical and administrative judgment that the executive is better placed to run. That restraint is the counterweight to the affirmative direction that follows: the Court grounds its intervention not in second-guessing the science, but in the constitutional adequacy of the system of redress.

The pivot is the phrase "no-fault." A no-fault scheme detaches compensation from proof of negligence. In the ordinary tort frame, a family alleging that a vaccine killed their relative must establish causation and fault against a manufacturer or the State — a burden that, in the setting of TTS, autoimmune encephalitis or intracranial bleeding, runs into the hardest problems of medical causation. By directing a no-fault policy, the Court shifts the burden away from families having to prove negligence in complex medical causation, and toward a structured, administered remedy that responds to serious injury as such. The logic is familiar from other mass-exposure contexts: where the State organises a campaign that confers a broad public benefit, the rare and serious individual harm it produces is treated as a cost of the programme rather than a private wrong to be litigated.

The Article 21 reasoning is incremental rather than novel. The Court does not announce a new right to be vaccinated safely or a damages remedy for vaccine injury; it reads into the State's duty to protect life a corresponding duty to provide a coherent mechanism of redress where its own public-health programme produces grave harm. The transparency direction is of a piece with this. Disclosure of AEFI data is not merely informational housekeeping — it is the precondition for any rational redress system, because a family cannot situate its loss, and a policy cannot be calibrated, without the underlying data being public and the surveillance that generates it kept running efficiently.

It is worth marking the limits the Court itself drew. There is no finding that any vaccine was defective, no finding of manufacturer or governmental negligence, and no individual award. The judgment is a mandamus to legislate-by-policy, and its force will be tested in the design of the scheme the Centre is now directed to produce — what counts as a "serious" adverse event, what threshold of association to a vaccine triggers payment, how causation is assessed administratively, and at what level compensation is set. The Court has fixed the obligation; the content remains to be filled.

Why it matters

For families of those gravely injured after immunisation, the decision converts a diffuse grievance into a concrete entitlement to a system. They are no longer told to prove negligence in a forum ill-suited to the task; they are owed a policy framework built to respond to injury without that proof. That is a significant relocation of burden, even though no rupee was awarded in the case itself.

For the State, the judgment confirms that organising a mass public-health programme carries a constitutional tail. The duty under Article 21 does not end when the campaign succeeds; it extends to the rare casualties the campaign produces, and to the transparency that makes redress and accountability possible. Future immunisation drives — for COVID-19 or anything else — now sit against the expectation of a structured, no-fault redress mechanism and disclosed surveillance data.

And for the wider law, the case is a measured example of the Court's affirmative-duty jurisprudence: restraint on the technical question of who investigates, assertion on the constitutional question of whether a remedy must exist. The remedy it commands is institutional and forward-looking, and its real test will come when the policy it has ordered is written.

Related on Valkya

• Spring Meadows Hospital v. Harjol Ahluwalia
• Indian Medical Association v. V.P. Shantha
• Jacob Mathew v. State of Punjab
• In Re Phalodi Accident v. NHAI

Sources

• LiveLaw, "Frame No-Fault Compensation Policy For Adverse Events Due To COVID-19 Vaccination: Supreme Court Directs Centre" (livelaw.in/top-stories/...-525774)
• Verdictum, "Rachana Gangu v. Union of India, 2026 INSC 218 — COVID-19 Vaccination Deaths, No-Fault Compensation Policy" (verdictum.in/court-updates/supreme-court/...-1609687)
• LiveLaw, "2026 LiveLaw (SC) 225 — Rachana Gangu & Anr. v. Union of India & Ors." (livelaw.in/sc-judgments/...-525964)