UPSC Express

Headline : Who was Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis or ‘PCM’?

Details :

About P C Mahalanobis

Early life:

• P.C. Mahalanobis was born in Calcutta on June 29, 1893.
• He was educated at the Brahmo Boys School, founded by Raja Ram Mohan Roy and went on to receive a B.Sc in Physics from Presidency College, Kolkata.
• After completing his majors in Physics from Presidency College in Calcutta in 1912, Mahalabonis joined the University of London the following year.

 

Anthropometry:

• He introduced to the concepts of anthropometry (the study of measurements and proportions of the human body) and anthropological data through Biometrika, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

• From here, he developed a keen interest in statistics and its utility to problems in meteorology and anthropology.

 

Founder of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI):

• As Mahalabonis had many colleagues who were interested in statistics, an informal group formed in the Statistical Laboratory located in his room in Presidency College.
• After calling a meeting with few of his colleagues, Mahalabonis established the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) and formally registered it on April 28, 1932.
• The ISI, under Mahalanobis, would go on to do some of the most spectacular large-scale survey and data analyses including assessing the impact of the 1942-43 Bengal famine, tabulating the 1941 census, surveys on rural indebtedness, velocity of circulation of rupee coins, traffic flow, crop yield estimation etc.
• The institute founded the journal ‘Sankhya: the Indian Journal of Statistics’.

 

Mahalabonis Distance (MD):

• Mahalabonis Distance (MD) is a multi-dimensional generalisation of the idea of measuring how many standard deviations away is point P from the mean of a distribution D.
• Apart from MD, which measures distance relative to the centroid – a base or central point which can be thought of as an overall mean for multivariate data.
• The most common use for the Mahalanobis distance is to find multivariate outliers, which indicates unusual combinations of two or more variables.

 

Contribution to sample survey:

• Mahalabonis’ important contributions involved large-scale sample surveys.
• He introduced the concept of pilot surveys and advocated the utility of sampling methods.

 

Mahalanobis model:

• Mahalanobis played a key role in formulating the Second Five-Year Plan, which is synonymous with the ‘Mahalanobis model’, also known as the Feldman-Mahalanobis Model.
• The basic idea of the model said that in order to increase domestic consumption, there needed to be an investment in the production of capital goods.
• He emphasized on the importance of industrialization and also corrected previous census methodology errors.

 

Honors:

• Mahalabonis was deeply interested in cultural pursuits and was awarded one of the highest civilian awards, the Padma Vibhushan from the Government of India for his contribution to science.
• In 2006, named June 29 as National Statistics Day in honour of Mahalanobis.
• Mahalabonis died on June 28, 1972, a day before his seventy-ninth birthday.