The quality of a democracy is measured by its statistics. The Government needs reliable numbers of people; their livelihoods, struggles and triumphs. In a democracy, where decisions ought to be based on evidence, the collection of good data is a particular boon.
Today, virtually any report on the details and numbers – from population to poverty and household expenditure – invariably turns to the National Sample Survey. A juggernaut of statistical ambition that was started in 1950, under the guidance of Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis.
On Mahalanobis’s Sample Surveys, the famed statistician of the United States, W.E. Deming, wrote:
No country, developed, under-developed or over-developed, has such a wealth of information about its people as India.
P.C. Mahalanobis, or ‘the professor’ (as he self-styled himself) is considered the architect of Indian statistics; founder of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI). He is the reason that numbers coming from India have been taken seriously as far back as 1930.
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