Reminiscences

Invited Lecture Delivered for the 133^rd Birth Anniversary of P.C. Mahalanobis: 29 June, 2026

It is a pleasure to be with you today on this auspicious occasion. Since its very inception, ISI has been adorned by academic stalwarts. By comparison, I am a small person. I address this gathering therefore with all the humility in my possession. I understand that Professor Kalyan Bidhan Sinha, erstwhile Director and a highly regarded mathematician is addressing the ceremonies today in the Bengaluru Campus. I am not sure who is speaking in the Delhi Campus, but he must be an eminent scholar also. I am not one such person and have arrived here with a feeling akin to trepidation.  

I joined the Institute many years ago, so long ago I am afraid, that I hesitate to even admit it. There was a surprise associated with my joining though and I will share it with you at the very end of my reminiscences. Leaving this matter aside, it is best that I begin my story with what was otherwise the very beginning of my story at ISI. As you know, P.C. Mahalanobis was the architect of India’s Second Five Year Plan (1956-1961). When he was working on it, a wing in the topmost floor of the Planning Commission was reserved for him and his team. This was Yojana Bhavan (now renamed Niti Bhavan), located in Parliament Street (or, Samsad Marg), right next to the Reserve Bank of India and close to the All India Radio Building. After the Second Plan exercise was over, the professor moved back to Kolkata to spend most of his time in this Baranagar head quarter. But he left behind him a group of talented people in what was called the Planning Unit of ISI, Delhi Centre (now renamed Economics and Planning Unit). As a result, ISI had a Delhi Campus, located in the fifth floor of the Planning Commission. And some of India’s best known economists were permanent employees there. They included, the Late Bagicha Singh Minhas, the Late T.N. Srinivasan, Professor Pranab Bardhan, Professor Kirit Parikh, the Late Suresh Tendulkar and a few others. Professor Jagdish Bhagwati too may have been a part of the academic staff for a while.

When I was still a PhD scholar in USA, I received a letter from Professor Bardhan telling me of the Planning Unit and asking me to join it after I finished writing my dissertation. He informed me that they had a teaching and research programme where I could participate in the area of Mathematical Economics. I spoke to my friends and advisers and all of them strongly recommended that I take up the position. So, most of my earliest memories of ISI as a worker are not associated with Baranagar. My early memories surround Yojana Bhavan, where ISI had then become a bit of an insecure tenant after Bagicha Singh Minhas’s truncated tryst with the Planning Commission as one of its Members. ISI was not associated with the five year plans anymore and we were blocking up prime property, doing nothing that was immediately relevant for the Government of India. 

Fortuitously though, we had a plot of land allotted to us in South Delhi in the Qutab Institutional Area and the present Delhi ISI campus had begun to come up there. The Administrative Building and the Guest House, or probably the Students’ Hostel, were soon ready and we moved over to the new campus sometime in the mid-seventies. In the beginning, most of our offices were located in the ground floor of the Guest House or Students’ Hostel. The working Guest House was still a rented building in the Hauz Khas area. Adjacent rooms in the new Guest House building were connected by a single washroom and there was a way of locking your neighbour out of the washroom when you were occupying it. This used to create two kinds of problems. Using the washroom for too long, thus banishing your neighbour from it. Or, worse, forgetting to lock your neighbour out, thereby creating embarrassment for persons entering the facility while it was being utilised by someone else. Professor Abhirup Sarkar, the well-known economist, has a funny story to relate about this matter and he may well tell you the details someday.

A regular visitor in ISI, Delhi then was a famous probabilist, the Late K.R. Parthasarathy, who offered courses in Measure Theory and Stochastic Processes once a week. He started off lecturing in the Planning Commission itself and continued thereafter in the newly built campus. He was then a faculty member of Delhi IIT, but he joined ISI, Delhi soon after. Given my interest in mathematical methods, I attended his courses sitting face to face with a true mathematical genius. When I try to assess P. C. Mahalanobis’ contribution to Indian academics, things of this nature readily come to my mind. He had been able to assemble together some of the best minds in the country and abroad to contribute to the cause of disciplines that were held together by the tools of statistics and mathematics. 

The ISI started off with Statistics and Mathematics, but other quantitative disciplines were added to its research and teaching departments over time. Among these were Economics, Physics, Geology and so on and so forth. As a result, ISI can be described as a truly cosmopolitan organization which is specialized in the application of quantitative methods. Or at least, that is the vision of ISI I possess. 

Mahalanobis’ eyes were always open towards talent, not just in India but all across the world. Consequently, anyone working in the institute found opportunities to brush shoulders with famous personalities. Including Fields Medalists and Nobel Laureates. And as we all know, ISI produced the Late C.R. Rao, who won the International Prize in Statistics in 2023. It is the equivalent of a Nobel Prize. This genius of a statistician was entirely home produced in ISI and there is little doubt that P.C. Mahalanobis created the environment necessary to bring out C.R. Rao’s talent. 

There was a converse side of the story also. The professor often provided permanent employment to people with questionable credentials. As I know from personal memory in Delhi, a worker there was known to be a linguist. He was a specialist in the Russian language, or so we were told, who had been employed to translate Russian planning model literature for the professor. By the time I came across him, ISI was no longer associated with planning, but this gentleman was still around with no specific work assigned to him. He used to perambulate the corridors of the Planning Commission and later the South Delhi campus doing exactly nothing other than collecting a salary at the end of the month. This man had approached me once (and other newcomers as well) with the message that he had invented a universal language that could be understood and spoken by anyone in the world irrespective of his or her mother tongue. Like everyone else, I didn’t understand this language. His true mettle was tested when the Late Andrey Kolmogorov was visiting us from the then Soviet Union. During Kolmogorov’s seminar, the linguist suddenly stood up and began to display his command over a foreign language by asking a question. The audience assumed he was speaking Russian. Kolmogorov, however, looked stupefied for a while and finally requested the man to speak slowly since he didn’t understand English that well. Whatever he had said to Kolmogorov had not sounded Russian to him. Therefore, what he had translated for Mahalanobis himself remains a mystery too. I will not mention his name for obvious reasons, but I have a piece about him in my blog site. It’s titled Anti-clockwise Bhagat. If you have time to waste, you can learn more about the man from my written account.  

This man was not the only one of his kind in ISI, Delhi, or Kolkata for that matter. After I was transferred to Kolkata in the late seventies, I came across many such persons languishing in in some sort of disguised unemployment. I developed friendly relationships with them over time and discovered that many of them were highly accomplished people. Accomplished though in the wrong discipline. One such man worked for the then National Income Research Unit and was a great classical vocalist. He would sit at his table and sing away meghmalhars on cloudy afternoons. This particular gentleman was an excellent photographer too, who developed and printed his photos by himself. Those were pre-digital days of course and I admit that I ended up learning a lot from him about black and white photography. My learning was aided further by books available in the ISI library itself. I am not entirely sure who had ordered these books for the library, but I can appreciate the nature of diversity ISI could boast of.

Being a part of the academic community in ISI was a blessing of sorts. This manifested in many different ways during my days. One of these was the nature of the curriculum most of us taught. No strict syllabus was imposed upon us and we often taught what we liked best, whatever may be the name of the course. We had the brightest students possible and they were ready to absorb any well thought out academic material. The result was that, at least for some of us, the boundary between teaching and research were blurred. What we taught gave us research ideas and I can vouch for myself at least that most of my own published papers were born in ISI classrooms. I think other internationally famous ISI professors will have had similar experiences. The people I have in mind in this context from the Economics faculty in Kolkata and Delhi at least are renowned professors like Bhaskar Dutta, Arunava Sen, Parkash Chander, Satya Ranjan Chakraborty and others. 

The freedom enjoyed in ISI brings back another story to my mind. It involves the Late D.K. Bose in the Economic Research Unit, where I worked myself. A bright young scholar had given a seminar in our department and I was truly impressed by his presentation. Since there was no post concept at the time, I rushed to D.K. Bose, who was the Professor-in-Charge of the Social Sciences Division at the time and requested him to find out if this young man could be offered a position. Bose agreed with me and told me a few weeks later that he was about to be employed. However, when I asked him about the salary offered, I learnt much to my disappointment, that it was totally inadequate. The appointee was already drawing a higher salary elsewhere. I was furious and told D. K. Bose in no uncertain terms that he had done his best to lose a talented person. I think Late Ashok Maitra was the Director at the time. Soon after, within a week I think, D.K. Bose visited my office and informed me that Maitra had done the needful and the salary being offered was quite attractive. I was happy needless to say. What made me jump through the ceiling was Bose’s offer that I myself carry the appointment letter to the appointee’s dwelling. “Since you think so well of him, maybe you will enjoy delivering the letter yourself.” I was flabbergasted, but I did what I was told. The young scholar ended up joining ISI and spent his entire working life here. He is one of Kolkata’s best known economists. The incident shows how, unlike many other institutions, we were not imprisoned in a straitjacket in ISI. That was one of the most praiseworthy characteristics of the institution. 

ISI was always ready to conduct interdisciplinary research. This was evident especially in the collaborative work that was done by statisticians and economists. I was primarily a theorist and consequently more of an observer of such proceedings. But I have vivid memories of the nature of those works. For example, the Reserve Bank of India approached us with a problem around 1989 or so. They were concerned about the acute shortage of currency notes supply in the Indian economy to smoothly carry out regular transactions. The Bank wished us to find out what would be an optimal procedure to print notes of different denominations to address the problem. The Economic Research Unit faculty held several meetings with RBI officials and finally decided to approach the famous statistician Jayanta Ghosh to help them out with ideas based on statistical methods. This project was taken up and finally completed. 

With the progress of technology, especially digital technology, the problem I just described has probably lost its significance today. Even so, the story illustrates the nature of real world issues ISI was engaged in solving, at the same time that its great mathematicians and probabilists were discussing theoretical matters like convergence of probability measures or its mathematical economists were proving the existence of equilibrium theorems in infinite dimensional spaces or working on mechanism design problems. Mahalanobis had built a hot house of sorts that accommodated the greatest possible variety of plants.

Another memory that I have about ISI is that of the first computer I had ever seen in my young days as a student of the MA class in Calcutta University. I had chosen Statistics for a special paper and the Late Nikhiles Bhattacharya used to give us special lectures on the subject. He used to travel from ISI to Kantakal and was a Visiting Professor in the Economics Department there. Nikiles Babu was a soft spoken person but quite demanding as a teacher. I have many memories of this wonderful man both from the time when I was a student as well as from the period during which we were colleagues in ISI. As students, we had heard of the arrival of a Soviet made computer in ISI and approached Nikhiles babu to arrange for us to see it with our own eyes. This was done of course and we lined up in the ground floor of the main building to have a first glimpse of it. I didn’t understand what I was looking at and all I remember is that it was a very large object. When I think of that machine and look at my smart phone today, I feel amazed. Amazed by what humanity has been able to achieve over time and especially the twentieth century. My peers and I were lucky to have been born at the right time and experience the right things it would seem. As I am getting older each day, I am being exposed to even more amazing advances in knowledge. Artificial intelligence for one. It is probably the latest gigantic leap we are all experiencing knowingly or otherwise. I have not consciously tried to acquaint myself with AI, but I know that I am using it almost every day when I engage in google search. I do not know if ISI scholars are engaged now with AI research, but I will not be surprised if they are. After all, the Mahalanobis spirit survives still and one expects academicians in ISI to absorb every new bit of knowledge that is sprouting anywhere on earth. 

Nikhiles babu was a statistician turned econometrician, one of the best ISI could have boasted of. He led the econometrics group in the Economic Research Unit and produced a large number of research scholars. Professor Dipankor Coondoo was one of them and is definitely one of India’s top econometricians. Dipankor himself produced wonderful students too. One of them was Professor Amita Majumdar, who retired not too long ago from the Economic Research Unit. Like Nikhiles babu, his students never displayed arrogance surrounding their academic achievements and helped a great deal to create an environment of friendliness in Economic Research Unit.  

I started out by promising to present you with a surprise at the end. I have reached the end now and it’s time that I spring the surprise. The surprise in question is that I never saw P.C. Mahalanobis. I came back from USA in 1972 and visited this campus before moving on to join the Delhi Planning Unit. As I walked through the main gate, I felt that a pall of gloom had descended on the campus. Someone or the other said to me that Mahalanobis had passed away that very day. I am a living example of a person who had never seen Mahalanobis, but who had nonetheless enjoyed the fruits of his wisdom through his working life.