On May 25, Union health minister Harsh Vardhan while addressing the press said that 25,739 samples taken from Covid-infected people had been put through whole genome sequencing in India. This amounted to less than 0.1% of the total reported infections in the country at the time, woefully short of the target that the Centre had set in December: 5% of all positive samples.
Genome sequencing is crucial to detecting new variants of the coronavirus. Despite the massive shortfall in its efforts, India is not utilising existing sequencing capacity in the private sector. Virologist Shahid Jameel, who until last month headed the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomic Consortia, a network of 10 laboratories established by the health ministry for genome sequencing in December, said “there are a number of private labs with good capacity to sequence”.
But an order issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research in March 2020 expressly prohibits private labs doing Covid-19 molecular diagnostic…