At a statistical crossroads

Despite revisions, ISI Kolkata community protests a draft Bill, alleging it enables government control and pushes unwanted commercialisation. Sanjeeb Mukherjee explains

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The Centre has issued a revised version of the draft Bill to amend the legislation governing the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Kolkata, incorporating a few changes, but still the controversy it has triggered shows no signs of cooling Faculty members and teachers allege the revisions amount to little more than "cosmetic" changes, and do not address their concerns.

"In the revised Bill, professors have been included in the academic council and the board of governors will have two people from the academic council, but both will be nominated by the board. Six of the board members - four external and two internal faculty will be chosen by the remaining minority five members at the time of constitution, which leaves the whole board under the control of a minority group," Arijit Bishnu, professor at ISI Kolkata, told Business Standard. "Therefore, we are sticking to our earlier stand of requesting the ministry to withdraw the Bill and initiate discussions with stakeholders." Last week, several current and former teachers, students, research scholars and staff members of ISI Kolkata formed a human chain outside the campus demanding scrapping of the draft. They carried portraits of Prashanta Chandra Mahalanobis, the institute's founder who is also known as the father of Indian statistics and chief architect of India's second five-year plan (1956-61), popularly called the Mahalanobis Plan.

Resource allocation to broad sectors such as agriculture and industry in the second five-year plan was based on models developed by Mahalanobis. ISI, according to experts, is a society with its own memorandum of association, bylaws and regulations, registered under the West Bengal Societies Registration Act, 1961. It was designated an Institute of National Importance (INI) through the ISI Act, 1959.

The key question is what in the new Bill has agitated India's statistical community and driven ISI's staff and students into open protest.