The DNA database India needs

Being a techie, I generally do not like writing opinionated articles. But this one I had to write. Recently read that “Right to privacy” has become a big issue in India. I do understand that right to privacy is a must for any citizen of a country but what about criminals, do criminals need right to privacy too. My common man’s thinking gets me to say that it is not needed for criminals. But why am I blabbering about “Right to Privacy” at the first place here.

If “Right to Privacy” act is passed in the current form in India then India will never be able to build a DNA database of criminals. In a country like India that has over a billion people a “DNA database” is a must. Every few minutes a crime happens in our country. A lot of those crimes can be easily solved if we have a DNA database in place. Almost all the heinous crime sites have some form of evidence which can be collected and some form of dna samples can be extracted from them. These sample can be used to search on existing dna data to find a match.

If you pick up any case from the TV Series “Forensic Files” you would understand how important a DNA database is. A lot of the cases that are shown on this tv series have been solved using the DNA database. I am a big fan of this series and had been watching it for few years now. It’s this tv series only that got me thinking whether we have a DNA database in India or not. I was so surprised to find that we still donot have a DNA database in India.

With the rise of big data building a biometric dna database is much simpler than it used to be earlier. I am pained to see that our country where seven years olds are building iPhone apps and nine years olds are building drones and with over lakhs of computer programmers we donot have a DNA database still.

Recently on facebook I had read about a little girl in himachal who was raped by a few goons while returning back from school. Till now that crime is not solved but atleast the police could have collected the dna samples and stored in the dna database so that next time when such people commit the crime again or think of committing such a crime, they would think twice before doing such a thing knowing that they might be caught even if they leave a small hair of their's on the crime site. On the eve of our independence day I just wish and pray that we are able to build this DNA database.