2017-06-29 Thu

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis was born today, June 29 in 1893, Calcutta. Known as the father of Indian Statistics, he devised the Mahalanobis distance. He was also instrumental in formulating India’s strategy for industrialization in the Second Five-Year Plan (1956–61).

India Post issued this commemorative stamp of Mahalanobis on 29th June, 1993.

Born in an academically oriented family, he graduated with honours in Physics from Presidency College, Calcutta (1912) before moving to England to study Physics and Mathematics from the University of Cambridge. It was in 1915 that he was introduced to statistics by one of his tutors. After returning to India, he became a professor of physics at Presidency College in 1922.

However, his interest in statistics started evolving into a serious academic pursuit, and he applied statistical methods to problems in anthropology, meteorology, and biology and established the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta (December 17, 1931).

Mahalanobis devised a measure of comparison between two data sets that is now known as the Mahalanobis distance. He introduced innovative techniques for conducting large-scale sample surveys and calculated acreages and crop yields by using the method of random sampling. He devised a statistical method called fractile graphical analysis, which could be used to compare the socioeconomic conditions of different groups of people. He also applied statistics to economic planning for flood control.

With the objective of providing comprehensive socioeconomic statistics, Mahalanobis established the National Sample Survey in 1950 and also set up the Central Statistical Organization to coordinate statistical activities in India. He was also a member of the Planning Commission of India from 1955 to 1967. The Planning Commission’s Second Five-Year Plan encouraged the development of heavy industry in India and relied on Mahalanobis’s mathematical description of the Indian economy, which later became known as the Mahalanobis model.

He also served as the chairman of the United Nations Sub-Commission on Sampling (1947-1951) and was appointed the honorary statistical adviser to the government of India in 1949. For his pioneering work, he was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, one of India’s highest honours, by the Indian government in 1968.