Statistics in India Today-Past Perfect, Future Tense!
Statistics in India Today-Past Perfect, Future Tense!
A P Gore
Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Pune
President, Indian Society for Probability and Statistics
Today we are all used to the idea of young Indian techies traveling all across the world providing IT solutions and services. But hardly anyone knows that a similar trend started 50 years ago. What? You ask incredulously. But there were no computers then, let alone PCs. Very true. Those techies were statisticians, helping many nations, some free and others still in colonial bondage, in their attempts at development. How did this come about? To answer such a question, we have to trace a little bit of history. Statistics is a young discipline, barely a hundred years old. It came to India as Professor P C Mahalanobis traveled home from England after the First World War and discovered that a journal named ‘Biometrika’ of this fledgling discipline had many things potentially useful for India. Perhaps the first Indian to get formal education in this subject was P.V. Sukhatme, who completed his Ph.D. in statistics from the University of London in 1936. He settled down in Delhi as a founder leader of a small statistics group within the Imperial (later, Indian) Council for Agricultural Research. Soon his work became well known and in 1956 he was appointed Director, Statistics Division, Food and Agriculture Organization, UN, Rome. There was a general awareness that progress in agriculture needed research, which in turn needed statistics. But a trained statistician was a rare breed. The new chief knew of one source of manpower. ICAR Delhi. The rest, as they say, is history. 1933, the year in which young Sukhatme joined the University of London was also the year in which Professor P C Mahalanobis founded the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI). He launched a series of statistical researches concerning critical social issues of the time such as management of floods, assessment of
A P Gore
Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Pune
President, Indian Society for Probability and Statistics
Today we are all used to the idea of young Indian techies traveling all across the world providing IT solutions and services. But hardly anyone knows that a similar trend started 50 years ago. What? You ask incredulously. But there were no computers then, let alone PCs. Very true. Those techies were statisticians, helping many nations, some free and others still in colonial bondage, in their attempts at development. How did this come about? To answer such a question, we have to trace a little bit of history. Statistics is a young discipline, barely a hundred years old. It came to India as Professor P C Mahalanobis traveled home from England after the First World War and discovered that a journal named ‘Biometrika’ of this fledgling discipline had many things potentially useful for India. Perhaps the first Indian to get formal education in this subject was P.V. Sukhatme, who completed his Ph.D. in statistics from the University of London in 1936. He settled down in Delhi as a founder leader of a small statistics group within the Imperial (later, Indian) Council for Agricultural Research. Soon his work became well known and in 1956 he was appointed Director, Statistics Division, Food and Agriculture Organization, UN, Rome. There was a general awareness that progress in agriculture needed research, which in turn needed statistics. But a trained statistician was a rare breed. The new chief knew of one source of manpower. ICAR Delhi. The rest, as they say, is history. 1933, the year in which young Sukhatme joined the University of London was also the year in which Professor P C Mahalanobis founded the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI). He launched a series of statistical researches concerning critical social issues of the time such as management of floods, assessment of