The Making of Indian Statistics

Mahalanobis understood this to a certain extent, as can be seen in a letter he wrote to C. D. Deshmukh, then president of the ISI: India needed an institute that was “outside Government but which would take up, by agreement with Government, such scientific work or research for promotion of science, or the coordination of scientific activities as can be done conveniently and efficiently by a non-official agency.”³³ Such a structure, unless codified, would not work without the presence of a strong individual, one who powered through with sheer force of personality, political relationships, and a deliberate willingness to flout bureaucratic rules he considered meaningless. The cracks appeared early, as Nehru's death in 1964 removed a key political patron. The Statutory Committee for 1964-65 found that the ISI’s budget preparation methods were “inadequate” and that important details were “lacking.”³⁴ There were other probes into the ISI, and review committees took an excessively harsh view of the institute in light of PCM’s unorthodox managerial style.³⁵

Slowly, ISI lost the systems responsible for its initial success. This decline was not instantaneous, and C.R. Rao, who continued as ISI director after Mahalanobis’ death in 1972, remained one of the most

in the world – his contributions to estimation theory, information geometry, and multivariate analysis continued for decades. Yet without Mahalanobis’ political access and calculated rule-breaking, the ISI gradually formalised into what he had spent his career preventing it from becoming: an ordinary government institution, subject to the usual bureaucratic rhythms of transfers, committees, and underfunding.³⁶

, in his account of this trajectory, identifies four reinforcing causes of this: the absence of an apex statistical authority (“Mahalanobis’ scientific achievements, his global stature, and his unique position in the Nehru cabinet ensured that he could act as a one-man statistical commission”); chronic underinvestment in computing infrastructure; the waning influence of technocrats in Indian policymaking as the Nehruvian premium on scientific expertise gave away; and the lack of feedback loops. The first three can be equated with lessening governmental interest and support, but the last is indicative of institutional malaise. Since data produced by the statistical system was consumed mainly by planners and academics, there was no broad constituency to notice or complain when quality declined.

The Rangarajan Commission, set up in 2000 under the former RBI Governor C. Rangarajan, identified this vacuum. In its

, it recommended the creation of a permanent, statutory National Commission on Statistics to serve as the core body for all primary statistical activities – a centralized endeavor that would monitor and enforce statistical priorities and standards, and ensure coordination among the many agencies involved. However, implementation here was half-hearted and the consequences of this partial reform became dramatically visible in 2019. The National Sample Survey Organisation had conducted its 75th round Consumer Expenditure Survey in 2017-18, the first such survey in six years, and one that economists had been waiting for with real anticipation (since consumption expenditure data is the basis for India’s poverty estimates). But when the results showed that consumer spending had actually declined for the first time in over four decades, the government suppressed the report. It was

, then formally junked.

There was also the persistent problem of delayed survey rounds, and the gap between consumption expenditure surveys had stretched to over a decade. Additionally, the NSSO was absorbed into a new National Statistical Office in 2019. When the next Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) was finally released in 2024, covering 2022-23, it arrived with a fundamental

: it was not comparable with any previous NSS round because the sampling design, the recall periods, and the structure of data collection itself had changed.³⁷ It

that the new methodology is superior, but the practical effect was the severing of the only long-running consumption time series that India had – the one Mahalanobis’ NSS had been building since 1950.

This non-comparability had immediate downstream consequences. When the World Bank published updated poverty estimates for India in June 2025, drawing on the HCES 2022-23 data, the economist

laid out in detail why the numbers were unreliable. The Bank had constructed a novel “welfare aggregate” that applied only to India, which replaced the standard consumption expenditure measure. He also observed that there had been “a steady erosion in the reputation India has enjoyed for its approach to poverty measurement.”

It is easy to be disappointed by the unfortunate arc of this story – one that moves from Indian Exceptionalism and the beginnings of a rich intellectual tradition towards a state-of-affairs that seems like the status quo. But the truth is that it is extraordinarily difficult to build functional institutions that do equally well on the efficiency and longevity axes. Mahalanobis built a statistical system that, for a quarter century, was among the most rigorous in the developing world. It produced the methods, the data, and the talent that let a newly independent country of 350 million people begin to see itself clearly for the first time. However, the apparatus relied on him, on Nehru’s conviction that governance should be scientific, and on an institutional hybrid that was never codified concretely. The legacy of Mahalanobis and the current state of affairs with the ISI lay credence to the argument that goodwill and personal genius are not durable institutional foundations because they lack guarantees of continuity as governments change.