The Death of a Discipline

As data-driven decisions reshape the world, Kashmir is producing jobless statisticians, and pushing a vital discipline out of its education system.

- Rayees Yaseen

Each year, universities across Jammu and Kashmir produce over a hundred postgraduates in Statistics. They come trained in data modeling, research methods, and other essential skills in a world driven by information. But instead of stepping into jobs, most of them step into uncertainty.

Despite their qualifications, they remain unemployed, underemployed, or drifting toward unrelated fields. Their expertise, built over years, is neither recognized nor absorbed.

This is not an accidental outcome. It's the result of an education system that continues to churn out students in a subject that is being slowly erased from public institutions, classrooms, and recruitment rosters.

In some colleges, recent semester registrations for Statistics showed zero enrolments.

The irony is hard to miss.

Statistics is used everywhere. It's at the heart of medical research, economic planning, policy design, agriculture forecasting, social media algorithms, sports analytics, and insurance modeling. It informs everything from election predictions to public health trends.