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 ...
