Post Human Genome Sequencing era, there is an increased expectation in the masses to get improved and faster diagnosis related to genetic defects leading to occurrence of diseases. It is hoped that harnessing the enormous amount of variability now available in different population would accelerate identification of predictive and predisposition markers for common and complex diseases genes as well as individual responsiveness  to medications and different environments. The most challenging task now is to identify informative markers from a milieu of variation data which are likely to be informative in such studies.

The Indian Genome Variation database (IGVdb) is a consortium activity established in 2003 deemed it pertinent to understand the inherent genetic variability of the subpopulations as a first step towards identifying susceptible biomarkers for any disease or understanding drug response in different subpopulations. This consortium, therefore, aims at providing information on variations in the subpopulations representing the entire country. These variations would be useful for investigators for specific candidate gene studies conducted in any part of the country.

Besides, containing information on informative SNPs in over 1000 genes (See the list of genes), also contains validated SNPs spanning the entire genome and regions of copy number polymorphisms. These populations which are both large (population size more than a million) and isolated have been defined on the basis of four major linguistic groups - Dravidian, Indo-European, Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman and span the Northern, Southern, Eastern, Western, Central and North-Eastern part of the country (See the Definition and details of populations). Majority of the genes have been selected on the basis of their relevance as functional and positional candidates in many common diseases including genes relevant to pharmacogenomics. This is the first large scale comprehensive study of the structure of the Indian population. The ultimate goal is to create a DNA variation database of the people of India and make it available to researchers for understanding human biology with respect to disease predisposition, adverse drug reaction, population migration etc