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This article looks at the growing push by Reliance Industries and its genomics arm Strand Life Sciences to make DNA testing cheaper and more widely available in India. It explains how genetic tests actually work, and why their results are often misunderstood — especially in a country shaped by caste, endogamy, and ideas of lineage. The article raises concerns about how ancestry and health data could be misused in marriage, employment, insurance, or politics, and questions who owns this data once it is collected.
What do we mean when we say someone has "great genes"? A big part of the internet recently asked Sydney Sweeney that question after she appeared in a controversial American Eagle ad that played on the homophones 'genes' and 'jeans'. On the surface, it was fun copy, but many people were quick to spot the dogwhistle it really was. The suggestion that someone, especially a republican woman with blonde hair and blue eyes has “great genes” carried a subliminal message about eugenics — about inherited superiority dressed up as humour and marketing. It was a reminder that while genes are a biological and scientific reality, the way we talk about them is loaded with serious social connotations.
Scientifically, genes are sequences of DNA that influence physical traits and disease risk in probabilistic ways, shaping likelihoods. But since our identity is so deeply tied to our socio-political lives, genetic information can quickly move beyond biology and into ideas of worth, purity, and hierarchy. That dissonance between what genes actually mean and what we project onto them becomes especially important when genetic information moves out of research labs and into everyday life as a consumer product.
Reliance, via its Strand Life Sciences unit, is trying to make that testing ubiquitous. Strand already markets clinical offerings such as CancerSpot — an early cancer-screening product — and wellness-oriented tests like NutriDNA, and it explicitly talks about scaling prices down dramatically over time. The pitch is familiar: make genomic diagnostics cheap and widely available the way mobile data was Jio-fied. Strand also runs accredited labs and a biobank and publishes standard privacy and terms documents, which shows they have the technical scaffolding to collect and store samples at scale. Although lowering the price to the extent they'd like to is just an ambition at the moment.
But what happens when sequencing and ancestry analysis are cheap enough to be impulse purchases? First, a quick reality check: population genetics research shows that India’s long history of endogamy has produced a measurable genetic structure: which means that communities often show distinct clusters in genetic data because of centuries of marrying within groups. That is a scientific fact, but it’s also perilously easy to misread. Genetics tells us about historical migrations and probabilities, not social worth. Translating a few markers into claims about “purity” or superiority, something we have a tendency to do in this country, is bad science and worse politics.
India has a severe caste problem that shapes marriage markets, employment opportunity, social dignity and everyday life. Cheap ancestry testing offers tools that can be hijacked into identity politics: imagine ancestry reports marketed or misunderstood as proof of lineage purity, or used by matchmakers and local gatekeepers to justify exclusion. Even probabilistic statements about shared ancestry have a chance of being weaponised in disputes, matrimonial negotiations or political rhetoric. Beyond lineage, genetic risk scores for disease could stigmatise individuals and families alike — insurers, employers or marriage brokers might treat genetic predispositions as a reason to exclude or penalize people, especially where legal safeguards are weak.
We don’t have to imagine the pitfalls — look at the U.S. example where companies like 23andMe turned consumer DNA databases into research assets by partnering with pharma (the GSK deal is the canonical example). And that move spelled profit but also complications about consent and commercialisation. The U.S. experience also includes security failures and messy legal fallout: high-profile breaches and the financial instability of firms holding genomic troves have triggered warnings that your genetic data can become an asset in bankruptcy or a target in litigation. Genealogical databases have even been used in criminal investigations, showing that relatives’ data can implicate you regardless of your own choices. Those episodes highlight how valuable, vulnerable, and legally fungible genomic datasets can be.
There are also practical, near-term harms to consider. Data ownership is foggy: Strand’s privacy policy and the existence of a biobank show capacity to retain and share samples and derived data, but their public statements do not reveal whether data will be sold, shared with commercial partners, or bundled across Reliance’s ecosystem. As cheap testing at scale turns DNA into a corporate asset; commercialisation pathways that are normal in pharma research (like licensing, partnerships, data sales) would play out differently in India’s patchwork regulatory environment. Add the risk of breaches and the possibility that a dataset becomes a saleable asset if a firm falters, and you have a recipe for both profit and prolonged exposure.
So what should we watch for — and demand — as this rolls out? First: clear, binding rules on consent and ownership, which means specifying whether raw data, derived insights, or biosamples can be stored, sold or shared, and for how long. Second: anti-discrimination protections that explicitly cover genetic data — India’s laws around health privacy and genetic discrimination are still evolving and need to be tightened. Third: transparency from companies about who they sell or license data to, and independent audits of security and retention practices. Fourth: public education that explains what ancestry and risk reports actually mean, to blunt the marketing-swirled temptation to turn probabilities into moral facts.
Affordable genome testing can do tremendous good with regards to earlier diagnosis, personalized care, and better public-health planning, but it can also entrench new markets for exclusion and profit from the most intimate human information. In India, where caste and lineage are already political currencies, the stakes are especially high. If Reliance succeeds in scaling testing, regulators, journalists, civil society and scientists will need to move faster than the market: to make sure that when our genes become public knowledge, they don’t become a new grammar for prejudice.
