Hyderabad: Born on June 29, 1893, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, P.C Mahalanobis or called as PCM by his friends is known as the father of Modern Statistics Of India. This day is also celebrated as National Statistics Day. He was the member of India's First Planning Commission. Mahalanobis can easily be called a pioneer who brought the concept of planned governance to India. He founded the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in 1932.
PCM was born in a family of intellectuals. He studied in Brahmo Boys School in Calcutta (now called as Kolkata) and then studied Physics in Presidency College. After completing his graduation in 1912, he went to King’s College, Cambridge where he met mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. He also served as a secretary to Rabindranath Tagore and was also associated with Visva-Bharati University.
He also received Weldon Memorial Prize from the University of Oxford (1944) and Fellow of the Royal Society, London (1945). He became fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, UK, in 1954. Top statistical organizations in erstwhile USSR and the United States also honoured him, as did the King’s College, Cambridge
