A national repository for data related to life sciences has recently been constituted by the Indian government.
A data disaster recovery centre has been built at the National Informatics Centre in the state of Odisha, while the Indian Biological Data Center (IBDC) is located at the Regional Centre for Biotechnology in Faridabad, Haryana. The IBDC, which houses the Brahm high-performance computing facility, has a four petabyte data storage capacity. Additionally, it operates a web-based dashboard that offers individualised access, data input, data analysis tools, and real-time SARS-CoV-2 variant tracking.
Through two portals, the Indian Nucleotide Data Archive and Indian Nucleotide Data Archive—Controlled Access, the IBDC has already begun to offer nucleotide data submission services. It currently contains more than 200 million bases after receiving more than 200,000 inputs from more than 50 research centres across the nation.
As per the mandate provided by the Biotech-PRIDE (Promotion of Research and Innovation via Data Exchange) standards, the data centre has been set up to store all life science data produced from publicly financed research in the country. The aforementioned standards, which were released last year, make it easier and more possible to share knowledge of biology, facts, and data that have been produced through regional research.
The FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) concepts are another commitment made by the IBDC.
Researchers doing computationally intensive analysis have access to its computational resources. IBDC will soon introduce more data access and submission portals for different types of data.
Medical databases that reflect the diversity of India’s population are now being created. The Indian Council of Medical Research, the Indian Institute of Science, and ARTPARK are the organisations leading the program. Currently, they are trying to standardise data collection from partner medical centers and curate data in order to make it accessible to the local research and innovation community.