India's first national repository for Life Science data, generated from publicly-funded research in the country, was unveiled In Faridabad in Haryana on Thursday, November 10, by Science and Technology Minister Jitendra Singh. The Indian Biological Data Centre (IBDC), established at the Regional Centre of Biotechnology, has a data storage capacity of four petabytes and is also home to the 'Brahm' High Performance Computing facility, reported PTI. A data disaster recovery site has been set up at the National Informatics Centre, Bhubaneshwar, Singh said. The computational infrastructure at IBDC has also been made available for researchers interested in performing computational-intensive analysis.

The IBDC is a reflection of India's bid to house data within the country, when up until now, Life Sciences data was stored in Europe and the United States, said Prof Sudhanshu Vrati, Executive Director of IBDC. Singh also added that the IBDC is operating nucleotide data submission services via two data portals called the 'Indian Nucleotide Data Archive (INDA)' and 'Indian Nucleotide Data Archive - Controlled Access (INDA-CA)'. This has accumulated over 200 billion (one billion = 100 crore) bases from 2,08,055 submissions from more than 50 research labs across the country, said Singh, according to PTI.

Additionally, the Centre hosts an online dashboard for the genomic surveillance data generated by the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG) labs. This dashboard provides customised data submission, access, data analysis services and real-time SARS-CoV-2 variant monitoring across India. The Minister also said that the IBDC is committed to the spirit of data sharing as per FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles. Looking ahead, he added that data submission and access portals for other data types are under development and would be launched shortly.