- Lived:
- 29 June 1893, Calcutta (Kolkata) – 28 June 1972, Calcutta — one day short of his seventy-ninth birthday; a life lived almost entirely in one city, from which he measured an entire subcontinent
- Field:
- statistics — founder of the Indian Statistical Institute and of the National Sample Survey; architect of the Second Five Year Plan's economic model
- The Big Idea:
- A poor country cannot govern what it cannot see, and it cannot afford to count everyone — but a sample, drawn with mathematical care and checked against itself, can see 360 million people through a few thousand villages. He built the machine that did it.
- In their words:
- statistics, he insisted, was nothing less than "a key technology" of the modern age — the title he gave a 1965 essay
- If you remember one thing:
- The man who wrote the mathematics of India's boldest economic gamble also built the instrument that would one day measure exactly what the gamble had cost — and both the model and the measuring machine came out of one room in a Calcutta college.