SRINAGAR: India’s ambitious GenomeIndia project has crossed a major scientific milestone with over 10,000 whole human genomes sequenced and a nationwide genomic data infrastructure expanded to support disease surveillance, precision medicine and agricultural research, the government informed the Rajya Sabha on December 18, 2025.
In a written reply, Minister of State for Science and Technology Jitendra Singh said the GenomeIndia project has completed whole genome sequencing of 10,174 samples, drawn from a biobank of 20,195 biological samples established at the Centre for Brain Research on the IISc campus in Bengaluru. The project, involving twenty institutions across the country, has also completed joint analysis of sequenced genomes to build a comprehensive catalogue of genetic variations tailored to India’s population diversity. The government said this work is central to strengthening India’s own reference genome and developing genome-wide arrays for research and diagnostics.
The minister said institutions participating in the project include leading national laboratories, IITs, IISc, AIIMS Jodhpur, NIMHANS, SKIMS Srinagar, Mizoram University and several DBT-supported research centres, reflecting what the government described as a geographically and scientifically broad national effort.
On data governance, the government said all GenomeIndia data has been archived at the Indian Biological Data Centre, located at the NCR Biotech Cluster in Faridabad. Data access and sharing, it said, are governed by the Biotech PRIDE Guidelines 2021 and the Framework for Exchange of Data protocols, along with other applicable government rules, to ensure ethical use, security and controlled access to sensitive genomic information.
The reply said the Indian Biological Data Centre has undergone a significant expansion during 2024–25, both in scale and scope. New platforms such as the Indian Metabolomics Data Portal, Proteomics Data Portal, Biological Image Data Portal and a dedicated GenomeIndia Data Access Portal have been operationalised. The centre now offers 5.5 petabytes of storage and computing capacity of 961 teraflops, positioning it as one of the country’s largest biological data hubs.
Beyond storage, the government said the IBDC has emerged as a central data hub for large national projects in health, including INSACOG, as well as agriculture. It has hosted training programmes to build skills in biological data analysis, provided access to high-end computing for researchers nationwide and developed a suite of analysis tools and software for the research community under the platform named Bionode.
Highlighting the broader impact, the government said wider use of IBDC-supported datasets is expected to enable early disease detection, outbreak monitoring, precision medicine and antimicrobial resistance research in the health sector. In agriculture, integrated genomic, soil and environmental data are expected to accelerate the development of climate-resilient and high-yield crops, improve livestock breeding and support precision farming and soil health management. Biodiversity datasets archived at the centre are intended to support documentation of India’s biological wealth and inform conservation strategies.
The government also informed Parliament that the Indian TB Genomic Surveillance Consortium has been established, bringing together the Department of Biotechnology, ICMR, CSIR laboratories and clinical sites. So far, 17,517 tuberculosis isolates have been sequenced, with analysed mutation data for 15,749 samples made available to researchers through the InTGS portal.
According to the government, early analysis of this genomic data has revealed a high prevalence of mutations associated with resistance to first-line tuberculosis drugs and fluoroquinolones, while cases of extreme drug resistance remain very low. The distribution of resistance-linked mutations, it said, underlines the need for targeted next-generation sequencing-based diagnostics and personalised treatment regimens for tuberculosis.
Taken together, the reply positions GenomeIndia, the expanded IBDC and TB genomic surveillance as pillars of a national life-sciences infrastructure that the government says will increasingly shape India’s approach to public health, agriculture and biodiversity management.
