About
Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) is a Civil Service and Research institute which is recognized as an Institute of National Importance by the 1959 act of the Indian parliament. It grew out of the Statistical Laboratory set up by Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis in Presidency College, Kolkata. Established in 1931, this unique institution of India is one of the oldest institutions focused on statistics, and its early reputation led it to being adopted as a model for the first US institute of Statistics set up at the Research Triangle, North Carolina by Gertrude Mary Cox
Mahalanobis, the founder of ISI, was deeply influenced by wisdom and guidance of Rabindranath Tagore and Brajendranath Seal. Under his leadership, the institute initiated and promoted the interaction of Statistics with natural and social sciences to advance the role of Statistics as a key technology by explicating the twin aspects – its general applicability and its dependence on other disciplines for its own development.
ISI has its headquarters in Bonhooghly (Baranagar), West Bengal. It has four subsidiary centres focused in academics at Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and Tezpur, and a branch at Giridih. In addition, the Institute has a network of units of Statistical Quality Control and Operations Research at Vadodara, Coimbatore, Giridih, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune engaged in guiding the industries, within and outside India, in developing the most up–to–date quality management systems and solving critical problems of quality, reliability and productivity.
Primary activities of ISI are research and training of Statistics, development of theoretical Statistics and its applications in various natural and social sciences. ISI functions under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI) of the Government of India.
Key areas of expertise of ISI are Statistics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Mathematical Economics, Operations Research and Information Science and it is one of the few research oriented Indian schools offering courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level.
International Statistical Education Centre
History
During 1913–15, he did his Tripos in Mathematics and Physics at University of Cambridge, where he came across Biometrika, a journal of Statistics founded by Karl Pearson. Since 1915, he taught Physics at Presidency College, but his interest in Statistics grew under the guidance of polymath Brajendranath Seal. Many colleagues of Mahalanobis took an interest in Statistics and the group grew in the Statistical Laboratory.
In 1931, Mahalanobis was the only person working at ISI, and he managed it with an annual expenditure of Rs.250. It gradually grew with the pioneering work of a group of his colleagues including S. S. Bose, Samarendra Kumar Mitra (Head of the Computing Machines and Electronics Laboratory and designer of India’s first computer), J. M. Sengupta, Raj Chandra Bose, Samarendra Nath Roy, K. R. Nair, R. R. Bahadur, Gopinath Kallianpur, D. B. Lahiri, and Anil Kumar Gain. The institute started a training section in 1938.
- B. S. Haldane joined the ISI as a research professor from August 1957, and stayed on until February 1961, when he had a falling out with ISI Director P.C. Mahalanobis over Haldane’s going on a much-publicized hunger strike to protest the United States pressuring U.S. Haldane helped the ISI grow in biometrics. Haldane also played a key role in developing the structure and content of the courses offered by ISI.
Additionally, Bangalore had a Documentation Research and Training Centre (DRTC).
Academics
Later, ISI started offering Master of Technology (MTech) courses in Computer Science and in Quality, Reliability & Operations Research (QR&OR); these courses got recognition from All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE).
Degree courses
ISI offers two undergraduate programs, viz. Bachelor of Statistics (Honours) (B.Stat) and Bachelor of Mathematics (Honours) (B. Math), seven graduate programs, viz. Master of Statistics (M. Stat), Master of Mathematics (M. Math), Master of Science in Quantitative Economics (MSQE), Master of Science in Library and Information Science (MSLIS), Master of Science in Quality Management Science (MSQMS), Master of Technology in Computer Science (MTech–CS), Master of Technology in Cryptology & Security (MTech-CrS) and Master of Technology in Quality, Reliability and Operations Research (MTech–QROR). Diploma in Statistical Methods and Analytics. It also offers research fellowships towards obtaining a PhD degree.
Admissions
ISI conducts the written tests at various examination centres across India. International Statistical Education Centre.
Publications
Sankhya, the statistical journal published by ISI, was founded in 1933, along the lines of Karl Pearson’s Biometrika.
Rankings
According to India Education Review, no Indian university is in the world’s top 200 universities. The ascribed ranking of ISI is 186.
“Above mentioned information taken from Wikipedia”