My friend Zack Ajmal has been running the Harappa Ancestry Project for several years now. This is a non-institutional complement to the genomic research which occurs in the academy. His motivation was in large part to fill in the gaps of population coverage within South Asia which one sees in the academic literature. Much of this is due to politics, as the government of India has traditionally been reluctant to allow sample collection (ergo, the HGDP data uses Pakistanis as their South Asian reference, while the HapMap collected DNA from Indian Americans in Houston). Of course this sort of project is not without its own blind spots. Zack must rely on public data sets to get a better picture of groups like tribal populations and Dalits, because they are so underrepresented in the Diaspora from which he draws many of the project participants.
Once Zack has the genotype one of the primary things he does is add it to his broader data set (which includes many public samples) and analyze it with the Admixture model-based clustering package. What Admixture does is take a specific number of populations (e.g. K = 12) and generate quantity assignments to individuals. So, for example individual A might be assigned 40% population 1 and 60% population 2 for K = 2. Individual B might be 45% population 1 and 55% population 2. These are not necessarily 'real' populations. Rather, the populations and their proportions are there to allow you to discern patterns of relationships across individuals.
