In the Hindustan Times, Menaka Guruswamy, a Supreme Court lawyer, points out the dystopian nightmare hidden in India’s 2015 DNA profiling bill:

Most troubling is that the bill provides that the DNA profiles will be made available for identification in criminal cases during judicial proceedings to enable decisions in criminal prosecution for the defence of the accused and, rather strangely, ‘for the creation and maintenance of a population statistics Data Bank that is to be used … in identification research, protocol development or quality control…’.

As if this were not enough, the DNA information can also be used for ‘any other purposes’ as may be prescribed.

The idea that the State can assemble a population data base, not simply a census but a blood history of its citizens, so as to enable identification research or even quality control, is anathema to a constitutional, democratic India.

This bill, when worked in tandem with the Aadhar regime, has the potential to profile, rather intimately, every Indian.

In fact, this bill reads like very bad science fiction, one in which the State runs amok and bad science leads to little truth, many lies and an abuse of our DNA.”