Who was Mahalanobis?

At independence India had no data, so the National Sample Survey was established in 1950. "Nehru handed the responsibility of running the survey to scientist PC Mahalanobis - now called the father of Indian statistics - and the organisation he founded, the Indian Statistical Institute," BBC. "The methods pioneered by it are now used by the World Bank and the United Nations. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton and co-author Valerie Kozel wrote in 2005: 'Where Mahalanobis and India led, the rest of the world has followed, so that today, most countries have a recent household income or expenditure survey'." Not any longer. In 2019, "The only two non-government members of Indian National Statistical Commission (NSS) have resigned," The Wire, because "The new survey data called the 'periodic labor force survey' has not been made public even though it was approved by the NSC in December'." "Three days later, some of those jobs numbers were leaked to the Business Standard newspaper, which reported that India's unemployment rate in the year ending June 2018 rose to 6.1 percent, its highest level in 45 years," NDTV. "The 2017-18 NSS consumer expenditure survey showed that the share of food in overall consumption went up 1.6 percentage points to 47.5% between 2011-12 and 2017-18. The survey results were junked by the government because they showed a dip in rural consumption," wrote Pramit Bhattacharya. The GDP back series data released by the Central Statistical Office (CSO) and Niti Aayog lowered the rate of growth during the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government to 6.7% from 8.1% and 7%, while increasing the growth rate to 7.4% during the first four years of the present government, TIE. Prime Minister Narendra Modi blames our first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru for all of India's ills today. "Check out all of Narendra Modi's statements, whether casual, delivered in the campaign heat or set-piece as in Parliament. Nehru is a recurrent theme," wrote Shekhar Gupta. At Independence, "From the integration of the country to fulfilling the needs of the common man, the situation seemed impossible. But Nehru managed to revive all hopes. In five years, the growth rate rose from 0.72% to 3.6%. Soon, the princely states became a thing of the past; the dream of one India, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari finally took a permanent shape," Mint. In addition to a new constitution, after more than 1,000 years of slavery under the Moguls and the British, Nehru held the first national elections and had the foresight to establish 5 Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), the All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS), and built the Bhakra Nangal dam, among many other achievements, wrote Karan Thapar. Mahalanobis may be praised by foreigners but he is inconvenient in India. After all, statistics show up the failures.