The Making of Indian Statistics | Alter Magazine

02026-05-22<br>Words by Hiya Jain

TheMakingofIndianStatistics

How Mahalanobis Counted India's Aspirations.

In June 1933, a new statistics journal, bearing the name Sankhyā, was founded by Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis [PCM] in Calcutta. The name was deliberate as the editor’s note explained in the first issue: “As we interpret it, the fundamental aim of statistics is to give determinate and adequate knowledge of reality with the help of numbers and numerical analysis. The ancient Indian word Sankhyā embodies the same idea.” Sankhyā is Sanskrit for number – but also, by philosophical extension, for adequate knowledge. This was the program that Mahalanobis was to champion.<br>The first five volumes illustrated an ambitious and independent agenda comprising forty theoretical and eighty-seven applied papers. These articles were a formalization of the newly founded Indian Statistical Institute’s (ISI) mission: to remove guesswork and produce precise estimates for hard-to-track problems in a fragmented, still-developing country. Where previously questions such as ‘how much jute is really grown in Bengal’ and ‘what is the yield per acre in any given season’ would have been answered by the subjective patwari system (of village revenue officials looking at a field and providing an estimate by eye), this was replaced with techniques like stratified random sampling and crop-cutting experiments.1

“It is both the duty and the pleasure of the editors of a statistical journal on the verge of its centenary to offer a very hearty welcome to Prof. P.C. Mahalanobis and his colleagues who have launched Sankhya and its first part (June 1933) reflects great credit on all responsible… The editorial committee have set themselves a high standard. Their colleagues in London will watch the progress of Sankhya with hopeful interest.”

- Journal of the Royal Statistical Society

1930

2025

The Making of Indian Statistics

But the ISI did more than apply existing statistical methods to Indian problems – it developed new ones. Mahalanobis' most distinctive methodological innovation was high-quality interpretation of a network of sub-samples: instead of drawing a single sample from a population, you draw two independent sub-samples processed by separate field teams, so that any divergence between results immediately flags a non-sampling error. The resulting estimates could then be compared. Sampling theory tells you how far apart two such estimates should fall by chance alone and any divergence beyond that benchmark has to come from somewhere else – investigator bias, recording errors, inconsistent application of instructions. This converted non-sampling error into a quantity that could be measured, traced back, and corrected between rounds.2 Harold Hotelling, then among the foremost statisticians in the world, eventually wrote that “no technique of random sample has, so far as I can find, been developed in the United States or elsewhere, which can compare in accuracy with that described by Professor Mahalanobis.”

This is the story of how India built, then lost, and is slowly regaining the infrastructure of national self-knowledge. The ISI under Mahalanobis was, for a quarter century, one of the most productive research institutions in the developing world – a place that attracted first-rate mathematical talent, developed novel survey methods, and generated the data on which an entire nation's economic planning depended. It was also, by design, a fragile institution dependent on a unique set of circumstances. When those conditions disappeared, the system disappeared too, with consequences that are only now becoming fully clear. How did a laboratory with a first-year budget of ₹238($2.5) 3produce all of this to begin with? And why couldn't it last?

Statistician by chance

Mahalanobis graduated from Cambridge University in 1915, where he read physics. He visited India, intending to return to his alma mater for a research project with C.T.R Wilson at the Cavendish Laboratory, “but he did not go back as he found a number of problems in India that could engage his attention.” As he was planning for this fateful trip back home, his contemporary C. R. Rao recounts, “The first World War was on and there was a short delay in his journey. Mahalanobis utilized this time browsing in the King’s College Library. One morning Macaulay, the tutor....drew his attention to some bound volumes of Biometrika.” 4 This was Karl Pearson’s 5 journal, which, since its establishment in 1901, was the principal venue for the new science of statistical inference. Mahalanobis read the volumes on the boat to India and was changed by them – a physicist, by training and vocation, had serendipitously found his calling.

1930

2025

Statistician by chance

Initially, he took up a post teaching physics at Presidency College in Calcutta. While statistics remained a side project of his, by then he had already encountered the man...