A nine-member bench of the Supreme Court will deliberate on whether right to privacy is a fundamental right, an issue recently raised when the Aadhaar card was declared mandatory.

Earlier, a five-member bench was to decide on this matter.

In addition to looking into whether the Indian Constitution mentions the privacy as a fundamental right, the bench will also review the decisions taken by two benches earlier, both which arrived at the conclusion that privacy was not a fundamental right. But smaller benches later decided that privacy was in fact fundamental right.

If the nine-judge bench decides that privacy is in fact a fundamental right, all matters pertaining to the Aadhaar scheme will be dealt by the original three-member bench, the SC said.