Exhibit · who holds the data
India built genomic data sovereignty. It gave it to the state.
The obvious version of this exhibit would say no framework exists in India to protect communities whose DNA is collected. That is not true, and the truth is worse. India has a national genome project, a national biological data centre, ethics guidelines, data-exchange protocols, and as of 2025 a state-run tribal genome programme. Sovereignty was built. It was simply assigned to a different party than the one the word was invented for.
What "data sovereignty" was invented to mean.
Havasupai, and what followed from it
Between 1990 and 1994, researchers from Arizona State University collected blood from the Havasupai, a small tribe in the Grand Canyon, to study type-2 diabetes. The samples were then used for schizophrenia, inbreeding and migration studies the community had never agreed to — including research that contradicted their own account of their origins. The consent had been broad, and obtained in English, a second language for the tribe. After six years of litigation the tribe won in 2010: compensation, and the return of the samples.
What grew out of that case is a body of practice with a specific shape:
| Instrument | What it does |
|---|---|
| CARE Principles Collective benefit · Authority to control · Responsibility · Ethics | Establishes that indigenous communities hold rights over data about them, not merely individuals over their own samples. Consent extends beyond the individual, and includes a right to withdraw and erase. |
| Tribal research codes | Twenty-six US tribes have enacted their own research legislation and administrative policy — collective protections that federal oversight does not provide. |
| Native BioData Consortium | A tribally led biobank in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. The community holds the samples and decides what is done with them. |
Every one of these vests authority in the sampled community — never in the national government. The Havasupai did not sue to make the United States the custodian of Havasupai DNA. They sued to become it themselves. The framework exists precisely because the state was not trusted to hold it.
What India built instead.
the same word, redirected
The instruments, named
who holds what, and who is not at the table
| Instrument | What it is | Who holds authority |
|---|---|---|
| Genome India Project | 10,000 whole genomes from 99 populations, with explicit oversampling of tribal communities — 31.1% of samples are tribal. Twenty institutions, 100+ scientists. Data at the Indian Biological Data Centre, Faridabad. | Department of Biotechnology |
| Biotech-PRIDE Guidelines & FeED Protocols | Govern how the data is shared and exchanged. | Central government |
| Gujarat Tribal Genome Project (2025) | "Creation of Reference Genome Database for Tribal Population in Gujarat" — the first state programme dedicated to sequencing tribal communities. | State Tribal Development Ministry |
| AnSI / BSIP ancient DNA study | 300 skeletal remains from Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Lothal and others. Conclusion announced before analysis. | Ministry of Culture |
The argument is about who was given custody and who was not consulted. The table is the exhibit; sorting it by custodian makes the missing seat visible.
The sovereignty case for Genome India is stated plainly in its own explainers: "Indian biological samples and genomic data have historically flowed to international laboratories, often as part of collaborations that left the originating institutions with limited downstream access. A national project hosted at a domestic data centre changes that equation."
Note the injured party: "the originating institutions." Not the originating communities. The grievance is that Indian laboratories lost access to Indian samples — which is a real grievance, and a completely different one from the Havasupai's. The remedy transfers custody from a foreign institution to a domestic one. The person whose blood it is does not appear in the sentence.
The trap in the word.
why decolonising alone produces this
"Foreign scientists should not control our ancestry." Said by a tribal council, this is data sovereignty. Said by a ministry that has already inverted one genome at a press conference and pre-announced the next, it is a claim to be the sole author of everyone's origins.
The phrase does not carry its own meaning. Everything depends on who "our" refers to — and in a society with thousands of endogamous groups ranked by birth, "our" pronounced by the state means the people who run it. A decolonial framework that stops at the national border hands custody to whoever holds the border.
This is why decolonise and debrahminise are two operations, and doing only the first produces nativism. The critique of Harvard's monopoly on ancient genomes is correct: one laboratory holds more than half the ancient human DNA ever produced, and its access practices have been criticised from within the field. But the remedy that has been implemented does not move authority toward the Irula or the Paniya. It moves it from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Delhi — and Delhi has already demonstrated what it does with the microphone.
Three custodians, and a seat that does not exist.
the state of it
| Party | Holds | Accountable to the sampled? |
|---|---|---|
| Harvard / Reich lab | More than half the ancient human genomes ever produced. The Rakhigarhi data. The comparative reference panels. | No |
| The Indian state | The 1922–58 skeletal collections. The only ancient-DNA clean room. Genome India's 10,000 genomes, a third of them tribal. The curriculum. The museums. | No |
| The Irula, Paniya, Chenchu, Kurumba, Toda, Kuṛux, Vedda — and every Scheduled Caste and Tribe sampled | Nothing. | — |
The Irula carry the highest AASI ancestry on the mainland and F*-M89 at 53.3% — a lineage branching near the root of the non-African tree. Their genomes are used to model the indigenous half of the only Indus individual ever sequenced. They hold no samples, no database, no consent authority, no right of withdrawal, and no institutional voice in either custodian. They were sampled, on the Reich lab's own account, "almost a decade" before 2019 — in the Genographic and CCMB era, under consent standards that predate every framework discussed on this page.
What the analogy actually shows.
the phone and the laboratory
Extraction from the body. Aggregation somewhere else. Analysis in a language the source cannot read. Conclusions returned as products or headlines that reclassify the source. What a platform does with behaviour, a laboratory does with ancestry.
And the parallel holds at the level of remedy, too. Data-protection law that gives the state authority over how companies use your data does not give you authority over your data. It substitutes one custodian for another and calls it sovereignty. India's genomic architecture does exactly this — and here the state is not a neutral regulator but an interested party with a published position on what the data should show.
What would actually count.
a testable standard
- Community authority, not national. A Scheduled Tribe should be able to refuse a study of its genomes, and to end one already running. Under CARE this is standard; in India no such mechanism is documented.
- Consent in the community's language, and covering interpretation. The Havasupai consent failed partly because it was in English. Consent in Tamil or Irula that permits sampling but not conclusions is not consent at the level the harm occurs.
- A right of withdrawal and erasure. Named explicitly by Indian scientists writing on CARE in 2025 as something India lacks.
- Return before publication. The finding goes to the community before the press conference — not after, and not in a journal it cannot access.
- Material benefit that reaches the sampled. Irula knowledge underpins most of India's antivenom supply; Irula genomes underpin the model of the Indus population. Neither has produced land, security or standing.
- And a tribally held biobank. The Native BioData Consortium exists. Nothing comparable exists in South Asia.
Indian scientists are making this argument publicly. A 2025 piece in IndiaBioscience sets out the Havasupai case, the CARE principles and the right to withdraw, and argues India needs "an inclusive, ethically grounded framework aligned with international benchmarks and culturally responsive governance." The demand exists inside Indian science. What does not exist is the instrument — and the instruments that were built went to the ministries instead.
The honest limits.
- Corrected here: an earlier framing on this platform stated that no Indian genomic governance framework exists. That was wrong. Genome India, the Biotech-PRIDE guidelines, the FeED protocols and the Gujarat tribal genome programme all exist. The claim is narrower and better evidenced: authority under them is vested in state institutions, not in sampled communities.
- Cited: the Havasupai facts and 2010 settlement, the CARE principles and the right to withdraw (IndiaBioscience, 2025); the 26-tribe research-code review and the Native BioData Consortium (Carroll et al., Frontiers in Genetics, 2022); Genome India's cohort size, 99 populations, 31.1% tribal sampling and IBDC hosting; the Gujarat programme's title and ministry; the AnSI study's scope and pre-announced conclusion.
- NOT claimed: that Genome India was collected without consent. Samples were taken under approved ethics protocols. The claim concerns collective authority after collection, which those protocols do not confer.
- NOT claimed: that the Indian scientists building these systems intend the outcome described. The 2025 CARE argument shows the opposite. The finding is about where authority landed, not about intent.
- NOT claimed: that the Reich lab's custody is preferable. It is the other custodian, equally unaccountable to the sampled, and its access practices are criticised from within its own field.
- Not researched here: the caste composition of the institutions holding this authority. It is a legitimate structural question and belongs in its own study, from public record.
Which of these are findings and which are readings
The page infers institutional intent from institutional structure. The evidence-type labels keep the two apart.