India protects its neem better than its DNA

Section 2(c) of the Biological Diversity Act protects every living thing in India except Indians. The law that might fix it closes in nine months

Your DNA is written in a chemical alphabet of four letters, three billion of them in a row. In one gene that builds the heart, twenty-five of those letters may be missing. The gap is old, passed from parent to child for thousands of years. Four to eight of every hundred people of South Asian origin carry it — perhaps a hundred million of us. Indian scientists found it, reporting in Nature Genetics in 2009 that carriers were seven times likelier to develop serious heart-muscle disease. For over a decade that was the answer.

In 2020 the answer changed. Researchers looked again, using far larger DNA databases and two big groups of heart patients — one over three-quarters European and five per cent South Asian. The missing letters, they concluded, were not the danger. The risk came from a rarer change sitting beside them. That is science doing its job. But notice where the work happened.  Whoever holds the data decides what is true about your body.

The most valuable unseen data on earth

About 87 of every hundred participants in the world's large genetic studies are of European descent. Europeans are nine in a hundred of humanity. South Asians are a quarter of the world and under two in a hundred of the data.

That is not merely unfair. It breaks the machinery. An AI system learns by being shown millions of examples; the examples are its training data, the finished system a model. A model shown mostly one kind of person becomes a doctor who has only ever practised in one town — confident, experienced, wrong about everyone else.

You see it in a prescription. Whether a standard dose of warfarin protects or harms you depends on genes that differ between Indians and Europeans, and between one Indian community and the next. You see it in a lab report, in the verdict called a variant of uncertain significance: the laboratory has found something unusual in your DNA and cannot say if it matters. Patients who are not of European descent receive that blank answer far more often, because the reference libraries hold too few people like them. One of us spends her working days at exactly that junction.

The uncertainty is not in the patient. It is in the library.

Now the uncomfortable part. For centuries most Indian communities have married within themselves. Whatever one thinks of that history, it left a mark: India is not one population but thousands of small ones, each grown from a limited number of ancestors, each concentrating its own rare inherited differences. Geneticists have always hunted for this — it is why Iceland and Finland have been studied so heavily. And it obeys a rule that governs all information: what is rare tells you more than what is common. Being told the sun rose teaches nothing. Being told it snowed in Chennai teaches a great deal.

The scarce ingredient in AI today is not computing power or capital. It is examples the machine has never seen. By that measure, India is the last great unexplored territory on earth.

The price has already been tested

In March 2025, the American company 23andMe went bankrupt, and its most valuable asset turned out to be fifteen million saliva samples. They were auctioned for $305 million — about Rs 2,600 crore, or roughly Rs 1,700 a person. Nobody broke the law. Everybody had signed something. The fifteen million were not in the room.

Meanwhile, the serious money has moved to models and the data that feeds them. In March 2026, Eli Lilly expanded a deal with the AI firm Insilico Medicine worth up to $2.75 billion, near `24,000 crore. In February 2026, Merck signed with the Mayo Clinic to pour patient records and genetic data into its own AI. Britain's UK Biobank sold four global drugmakers a nine-month head start on its genome data before wider release, and charges for access. The pattern is constant. Samples are the ingredients; the model is the recipe. The money goes to whoever owns the recipe.

We have fought this war before and won

Here is what makes India's silence so strange. No country on earth has thought harder about this question. We simply thought about it for plants.

When an American patent claimed turmeric for wound healing, India challenged it and the US patent office revoked it in 1997. When a neem-based fungicide was patented in Europe, India fought for a decade and the patent fell. When a Texas company claimed basmati, India contested that too. We built the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library so no one could patent what our grandmothers already knew. We pushed the principle into international law through the Convention on Biological Diversity and hosted its conference in Hyderabad.

Then we wrote it into our own statute. The Biological Diversity Act, 2002 established that inherited biological wealth belongs to the communities that carry it, that outsiders must seek permission before taking it, and that benefits must flow back. It created the National Biodiversity Authority in Chennai, state boards, and more than 31,000 Biological Management Committees — village-level bodies with a statutory voice over what leaves their soil. It is, by any measure, one of the most sophisticated things India has given the world.

And we wrote ourselves out of it

Read Section 2(c). Biological resources are defined as plants, animals and micro-organisms, their genetic material and by-products - "but does not include human genetic material."

A neem tree in a Tamil Nadu village has a statutory guardian. The people living under it do not. Parliament amended this Act as recently as 2023 and did not revisit the exclusion.

The result is an absurdity nobody has named. India's most valuable biological resource is the only one outside the framework India built to protect biological resources.

And our other law does not fill the gap. The Digital Personal Data Protection Rules were notified in November 2025, but most substantive obligations begin only on 13 May 2027 - nine months from now. Unlike Europe's law, ours creates no special category for genetic information, and it leaves a broad opening for research. It rests, besides, on a foundation that does not fit: one person consenting for one person's information. Your DNA is a photocopy of your parents and a preview of your children. And what makes it valuable to a model is not you at all — it is the pattern shared across your community. Nobody can consent on behalf of a community. No Indian law lets a community consent at all.

Meanwhile GenomeIndia has read 10,000 whole genomes from 83 communities, stored at Faridabad, with a stated target of ten million. NITI Aayog's July 2026 roadmap projects biology-based industries worth $691 billion by 2035, near `60 lakh crore, with a `50,000 crore fund behind it. The agreements that will govern all of it are being drafted now.

What should happen in the next nine months

This is not a case for hoarding, and the objection deserves an answer. Benefit-sharing did not shut down plant research; it structured it. The world still uses Indian biological resources — it now asks first. The same is achievable here, and Indian patients need what global science can build from this data.

Three things. Extend the framework we already have. Either amend Section 2(c) or build a parallel access-and-benefit-sharing regime for human genetic data under the Department of Biotechnology. The architecture exists; only the definition excludes us.

Classify genetic data as sensitive under the DPDP Rules before May 2027, with insurers and employers barred by statute. The window is open now and will not reopen soon.

Give communities a seat. More than 31,000 Biological Management Committees already sit across this country, doing precisely this job for seeds and plants.

Extending their remit is cheaper than inventing anything.

Twenty-five letters. A hundred million carriers. We went to war over turmeric on behalf of people who never knew their inheritance was being taken. Those same people are still waiting for us to notice they are worth more than the plants in their fields.

Nishant Sahdev is a physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a columnist on AI, infrastructure and global systems and Debarati Das is a BSc Microbiology student at Adamas University and was a summer research intern under Sahdev; Views presented are personal.