A recent report published by the New Indian Express said that the Ministry of Culture is obtaining an array of DNA profiling kits for a project aimed at tracing the 'purity' of India's races. The report suggests that the ministry has allocated a 10 crore budget plan for the project and is in the process of acquiring DNA-profiling kits and equipment to define genetic background.
Globally, the term "racial purity" has a long history of abuse and misappropriation. A number of geneticists, historians, academics, writers, former bureaucrats, among others have written to the Union ministry of culture to express concern over the reports that it is funding a project to establish the genetic history and trace the purity of races in India.
In an open letter addressed to the secretary of the Ministry of Culture, the signatories said, “…the notion of tracing the ‘purity of races,’ whether in India or elsewhere, is extremely worrisome. A plan to do so would be both absurd and dangerous.”
However, the Union Ministry of Culture claimed that the news report about the study was misleading and that it was not related to establishing ‘genetics history’. While acknowledging that the ministry concerned had already dismissed such reports, as “misleading and mischievous”, the group of intellectuals urged the ministry to “issue public disavowals of any present or future project related to race, especially one for studying racial purity.” Stating the concept of biological races was “discarded” long ago, they said, “…in terms of the genes that make up individual biological inheritance, all human beings, irrespective of where they come from, share the same ‘gene pool’.” “Racial stereotyping of humans has been discarded, and there should be no attempt to revive the concept in India,” the letter stated.
The letter came two weeks after a media report had claimed that the culture ministry was in the process to acquire DNA profiling kits and related machines to establish “the genetic history and trace the purity of races in India”. The signatories include geneticist and statistician Partha P Majumder, biologists Amitabh Joshi, LS Shashidhara, Satyajit Mayor, Raghavendra Gadagkar, historians Romila Thapar and Ramchandra Guha, among others.
The report had said that the project involved the Anthropological Survey of India, some scientists and scholars of the Lucknow-based Birbal Sahani Institute of Paleosciences and archaeologist Vasant Shinde. The project had begun in 2019, according to the media report.