• Union Minister Jitendra Singh dedicated India’s first national repository for life science data — ‘Indian Biological Data Center’ (IBDC) — to the nation at Faridabad. 

• The IBDC, established at the Regional Centre of Biotechnology in Faridabad, has data storage capacity of four petabytes and is also home to the ‘Brahm’ High Performance Computing facility.

• A data disaster recovery site has been set up at the National Informatics Centre, Bhubaneshwar.

• The life sciences data was till now stored in data repositories in Europe and the US, and a need was felt to house the data within the country.

• IBDC is mandated to archive all life science data generated from publicly-funded research in India.

• The data center is supported by the government of India through the Department of Biotechnology (DBT). 

• The computational infrastructure at IBDC has also been made available for researchers interested in performing computational-intensive analysis. 

• IBDC has started nucleotide data submission services via two data portals — the ‘Indian Nucleotide Data Archive’ (INDA) and ‘Indian Nucleotide Data Archive - Controlled Access’ (INDA-CA).

• It has accumulated over 200 billion bases from 2,08,055 submissions from more than 50 research labs across the country.

• The Centre also hosts an online ‘dashboard’ for the genomic surveillance data generated by the INSACOG (Indian SARS-CoV-2 Consortium on Genomics) labs that provides customised data submission, access, data analysis services, and real-time SARS-CoV-2 variant monitoring across India.

• Fundamentally, IBDC is committed to the spirit of data sharing as per FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles.

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