-Livemint.com Mahalanobis gave our data system global recognition and we must ask why we lost that credibility In the summer of 1946, at the ‘nuclear’ session of the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC), a representative of a British colony made an impassioned plea for laying down globally accepted standards for conducting large-scale sample surveys. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis argued that household surveys would become invaluable data sources for many developing countries that were...

-The Hindu India needs a top statistician to frame data-based policies for welfare and development In Poverty and Famines (1981), Amartya Sen argued that poor distribution of food, wartime inflation, speculative buying and panic hoarding were important reasons for the devastating Bengal famine of 1943, while Madhusree Mukerjee, in her 2010 book, Churchill’s Secret War, wrote of the role of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his wartime Cabinet’s decisions and “denial policy”...

-The Telegraph Calcutta: Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, the chairman and managing director of biotechnology company Biocon, today said incidents like the Gorakhpur hospital child deaths should trigger the debate "why we spend only 1 per cent of our GDP on health care". Mazumdar-Shaw, who was awarded DSc (honoris causa) by Presidency University, said: "A very, very worrying trend in India is that we spend only 1 per cent of our GDP on health care....

-The Economic Times blog In December 1956, Zhou En Lai, the Chinese premier and, after Mao, the second mostpowerful man in China, created much consternation by refusing to leave his meeting at the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) office at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Kolkata. He was talking to Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, the founder of the institute, and one of the pioneers in the field of survey methods. Zhou was...