Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) Ministry of Science and Technology; Minister of State (Independent Charge) Ministry of Earth Science; MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances, Pensions, Space and Atomic Energy, Dr Jitendra Singh dedicated to the nation India’s first national repository for life science data-‘Indian Biological Data Centre’ (IBDC) at Faridabad, Haryana.

Supported by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), it has been established at Regional Centre of Biotechnology (RCB), Faridabad with a data ‘Disaster Recovery’ site at National Informatics Centre (NIC), Bhubaneshwar.

It has a data storage capacity of about 4 petabytes and houses the ‘Brahm’ High Performance Computing (HPC) facility. The computational infrastructure at IBDC is also made available for researchers interested in performing computational-intensive analysis. 

Dr Jitendra Singh informed that IBDC has started nucleotide data submission services via two data portals viz. the ‘Indian Nucleotide Data Archive (INDA)’ and ‘Indian Nucleotide Data Archive - Controlled Access (INDA-CA)’ and has accumulated over 200 billion bases from 2,08,055 submissions from more than 50 research labs across India.

It also hosts an online ‘Dashboard’ for the genomic surveillance data generated by the INSACOG labs. The dashboard provides customized data submission, access, data analysis services, and real-time SARS-CoV-2 variant monitoring across India. Data submission and access portals for other data types are under development and would be launched shortly.