P C Mahalanobis: Data scientist, nation builder

This renowned scientist, statistician helped formulate the blueprint for India’s industrialisation. He also founded Indian Statistical Institute and devised the Mahalanobis distance.

Born in Calcutta to Probodh Chandra and Nirodbashini on June 29, 1893, Prasanta Chandra Mahalabonis was the eldest of six siblings. His grandfather Gurucharan was involved in the Brahmo Samaj and was a follower of Debendranath Tagore, father of Rabindranath Tagore. He was encouraged to pursue intellectual interests quite early in his life.

After passing out of the Brahmo Boys School, he joined the Presidency College and graduated in physics in 1912. He travelled to England where he joined the King’s College, Cambridge, for further studies. There, he met the mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan and was deeply influenced by him.

Career

He worked for a while at the Cavendish Laboratory with physicist CTR Wilson. He returned to India and was appointed professor of physics at the Presidency College in 1922. He taught there for three decades but the job did not stop him from pursuing his new found interest in statistics He formed a group that was interested in statistics. Later, that core group expanded and eventually, the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) was founded in 1932. In the next year, he launched Sankhya: The Indian Journal Of Statistics, a milestone in the history of science in India.

He also established the National Sample Survey in 1950 and set up the Central Statistical Organisation to coordinate statistical activities. He became a member of the Planning Commission in 1955 and continued in that capacity till 1967. In 1959, the ISI was declared as an institute of national importance.

Major contributions

Mahalanobis devised a measure of comparison between two data sets, now called Mahalanobis distance. Widely used in the field of cluster analysis and classification, he first proposed it in 1930 in the context of a study on racial likeness.

Later, he introduced innovative techniques for conducting large-scale sample surveys, calculated acreages and crop yields, using the method of random sampling. He devised a statistical method called fractile graphical analysis, used to compare socio-economic conditions of varied groups. He introduced pilot surveys, advocated the usefulness of sampling methods and included topics such as public opinion, consumer expenditure, crop acreage and plant disease.

In 1923, he married Nirmala Kumari, daughter of educationist Herambhachandra Maitra. His birth anniversary is celebrated as the National Statistics Day. Totally dedicated to his profession, he remained active with research work till the very end of his life. He died on June 28, 1972, a day before his 79th birthday.

Honours, achievements

Considered the father of modern statistics in India, he was honoured with the Padma Vibhushan in 1968. He was also conferred a large number of awards by international organisations, underscoring his stature as a luminary in his sphere.

He chaired the UN Sub-Commission on Sampling (1947-51) and 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.

.He was the backbone behind India’s second five-year-plan (1956 - 1961) which laid the blueprint for industrialisation and development in India. It was a period during which hydroelectric projects and five steel plants at Bhilai, Durgapur, and Rourkela were established, coal production increased, more railway lines were added and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Atomic Energy Commission of India were established.

2.In England, Mahalanobis was introduced to the journal Biometrika. Intrigued by it, he brought the complete set of the journal to India. In 1933, ISI brought out Sankhya - a journal along the lines of Biometrika.

3.The actor Shazad Latif portrayed the character of Mahalanobis in the 2015 movie titled The Man Who Knew Infinity, which was based on the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the math genius whom he was influenced by.

He analysed 60 years of data regarding the floods in Odisha and published his findings in 1926. This analysis later formed the basis for construction of the Hirakud dam on the Mahanadi river.

Source: Hindustan Times, 20/08/2019

Quote of the Day

“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”

‐ Albert Einstein

“प्रकृति को गहराई से देखें, और आप हर चीज़ को बेहतर समझ पाएंगे।”

‐ अल्बर्ट आइंस्टीन

Commitment and Balance

 Commitment is the language of the wise; complaint is that of fools. Commitment is a responsibility and it includes accountability. Our weaknesses result in disappointment. To overcome disappointment, boost your strengths. The greatest strength comes from the energy of commitment that brings excellence in all walks of life. Few people traverse the road of success without a puncture or two, but it is commitment to excellence that takes them through. To be committed is not being ‘stuck’; it is an integration of one’s being. If you are committed to honour your word, the base self in you will discourage you. If your energies are low, you will succumb. If you follow the higher self, the lower self will serve you, slowly getting integrated with the higher. In such a state, there will be integrity. Without integrity, life is shallow. Commitment also involves dropping illusions. We do not see the world as it is; we see it projected through our verbose minds. Our minds are filled with thoughts and words. Words represent experiences. Words are also influenced by memory. From the past, we see the present. So, we create illusions created by words, but we must filter them wisely. Through commitment, balance all walks of your life: family, work, social and spiritual. Creativity is to balance all walks of life. Creativity is just not creating something new always. Creativity brings excellence in one’s life. It is a state of well-being. Well-being creates completion. When one is complete, one is alive and vibrant in all walks of life.

Source: Economic Times, 22/08/2019

The monk who shaped India’s secularism

Vivekananda was a proponent of a multicultural nation rooted in religious tolerance and modernity

Has Indian nationalism turned utterly exclusivist? What would one of the icons of nationalism, Swami Vivekananda, have to say about this shift? Nationalism, after all, is a battle for the myths that create a nation.

The practice of Indian secularism, despite its pitfalls, has distinguished the country from many of its neighbours. India is the nation with the third-highest number of Muslims in the world. Its ability to consolidate democracy amidst unprecedented diversity could teach a lesson or two even to advanced industrial economies that have operated along the lines of a classic monocultural nation. The country’s secular ideals have their roots in its Constitution, promulgated by its people, a majority of whom are Hindus. Would this state of affairs change because a different morality, Hindu nationalism, has surreptitiously overtaken India’s tryst with secular nationalism?

Indian secularism has always attempted, however imperfectly, to respect the credo of sarva dharma sama bhava (all religions lead to the same goal), which translates to an equal respect for all religions. However, the early-day Hindu nationalists were clearly at odds with the idea. This was the reason Nathuram Godse assassinated one of its strongest proponents, Mahatma Gandhi.

Hindu nationalism today

For the likes of Godse, a corollary of the two-nation theory was that independent India was primarily a land for Hindus. More than 70 years after Independence, this notion has gained prominence as never before in India’s post-colonial history. This is evident when the Central government says it will consider all Hindus in neighbouring countries as potential Indian citizens. The most recent example of this is the bifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir, the country’s only Muslim-majority State, into two Union Territories, with all special provisions taken away from the erstwhile State’s residents.

Not only were Kashmiris not consulted, they were made to suffer an information blackout. Does this kind of Hindu nationalism align with the cosmopolitan nature of India’s millennial traditions?

Another question that needs to be asked is: Is it fair to appropriate Swami Vivekananda, another follower of the sarva dharma sama bhava philosophy whom Prime Minister Narendra Modi keeps citing, as a Hindutva icon?

Here, it is necessary to understand what Vivekananda’s life and world view said about Indian nationalism. His Chicago lectures (1893) marked the beginning of a mission that would interpret India’s millennial tradition in order to reform it and he later spent about two years in New York, establishing the first Vedanta Society in 1894. He travelled widely across Europe and engaged Indologists such as Max Mueller and Paul Deussen. He even debated with eminent scientists such as Nicola Tesla before embarking on his reformist mission in India.

One of the key elements of his message, based on the experiments of his spiritual mentor Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa, was that all religions lead to the same goal. Paramahansa is unique in the annals of mysticism as one whose spiritual practices reflect the belief that the ideas of personal god and that of an impersonal god as well as spiritual practices in Christianity and in Islam all lead to the same realisation.

While in Chicago, Vivekananda stressed three important and novel facets of Hindu life. First, he said that Indian tradition believed “not only in toleration” but in acceptance of “all religions as true”. Second, he stressed in no uncertain terms that Hinduism was incomplete without Buddhism, and vice versa.

Finally, at the last meeting he proclaimed: “[I]f anybody dreams [of] the exclusive survival of his own religion and the destruction of others, I pity him from the bottom of my heart, and point out to him that upon the banner of every religion will soon be written, in spite of resistance: ‘Help and not fight’; ‘Assimilation and not destruction’, and ‘Harmony and peace and not dissension’.

Religion and rationality

Vivekananda’s interpretation of India’s past was radical and, when he returned from the West, he had with him a large number of American and European followers. These women and men stood behind his project of establishing the Ramakrishna Mission in 1897.

Vivekananda emphasised that India needed to trade Indian spirituality for the West’s material and modern culture and was firmly behind India’s scientific modernisation. He supported Jagadish Chandra Bose’s scientific projects. In fact, Vivekananda’s American disciple Sara Bull helped patent Bose’s discoveries in the U.S. He also invited Irish teacher Margaret Noble, whom he rechristened ‘Sister Nivedita’, to help uplift the condition of Indian women. When she inaugurated a girls’ school in Calcutta, Vivekananda even requested his friends to send their girls to this school.

Vivekananda also inspired Jamsetji Tata to establish the Indian Institute of Science and the Tata Iron and Steel Company. India needed a secular monastery from where scientific and technological development would uplift India’s material conditions, for which his ideals provided a source of inspiration.

Influence on Gandhi, Nehru

Vivekananda made a remarkable impact on the makers of modern India, who later challenged the two-nation theory, including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose. He used the term ‘Daridra Narayan’ to imply that ‘service to the poor is service to god’, many years before Gandhiji addressed the socially oppressed as ‘Harijan’ (children of god). The Mahatma in fact opined that his love for India grew thousandfold after reading Vivekananda.

It is for these reasons that the latter’s birthday was declared as the National Youth Day.

Was Vivekananda then a proponent of Hindutva or of the millennial traditions that have survived many an invasion and endured to teach the world both “toleration and universal acceptance”? Should Hindu nationalism take his name but forget his fiery modern spirit that rediscovered and reformed India’s past? And shouldn’t India’s secular nationalism also acknowledge its deeply spiritual roots in the beliefs of pioneers like the reformer?

Rahul Mukherji is Professor, South Asia Institute, at the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University

Source: The Hindu, 21/08/2019

Notice, consent, privacy: Why we need to do better

A user’s interaction with privacy policies faces many blocks. The most basic is the barrier of accessibility.

Most people do not read privacy policies. Those who have tried would testify that these documents can be pretty hard to understand. Running into several pages that are filled with legal jargon and unexplained phrases, the main purpose seems to be to protect the company from legal liability rather than genuinely informing the consumer. We discuss this in a recent paper co-authored with Rishab Bailey, Faiza Rahman and Renuka Sane at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy.

We conducted a quiz to test how well urban, English-speaking, college going students understand the policies of five popular tech companies - Flipkart, Google, Paytm, Uber and Whatsapp. The short answer? Not very well. The students scored an average of 5.3 out of 10, faring the worst in areas where the policy terms were unclear or required the reader to make their own inferences.

The right to informational privacy implies that, at the very least, every individual should be able to determine who can use her personal information and for what purpose. Moreover, these interactions must take place in an ecosystem that recognises the power and information asymmetry between the parties, and has sufficient safeguards to protect the individual’s interests.

One way in which most data protection frameworks, including the one currently under consideration in India, try to achieve this is by resorting to the “notice and consent” regime. This framework regards individuals as pragmatic actors, who are capable of weighing the pros and cons of the options available to them and pursuing their best interests. Entities that seek to collect and use personal data are therefore tasked with the duty to provide adequate and meaningful “notice” to users. Armed with this information, users can then choose to grant their “informed consent”, which becomes the basis for processing of their data.

Each time a person clicks the “I agree” button she has presumably conducted a reasoned tradeoff between her desired level of privacy and the value being derived from the service in question. This would assume that each Uber user understands that the policy is worded broadly enough to allow the company to track her location at all times. Similarly, all Gmail users are comfortable with their emails being scanned for producing targeted advertisements.

In reality, however, a user’s interaction with privacy policies faces many stumbling blocks. The first, and most basic, is the barrier of accessibility. Almost none of the privacy policies are available in languages other than English. Of the companies we studied, only Google provided its privacy policy in multiple Indian languages. This is clearly not optimum in a country where only a fraction of the population is able to read and understand English.

Second, the construction of sentences and phrases in most policies is of a level that requires advanced comprehension skills. Using the Flesch-Kincaid readability score we found that all of the selected policies had scores ranging from 16 to 41, which correspond with graduate level reading skills. To put this in perspective, only about 8.2 percent of India’s above 15 population has an education level of graduate and above.

The third concern arises from the sheer volume of the transactions that take place in the digital economy and the big data analytics emerging from that. As per App Annie’s State of the Mobile Report, an average Indian smartphone user has about 70 apps on her phone. Spending even half an hour reading each policy would translate to about 35 hours of reading time. Add to this all the other daily interactions involving the processing of one’s personal data, and the impracticality of expecting a user to go through all the policies becomes evident.

Finally, even if a “model consumer” were to read and absorb every term, it would not change the fact that the user still lacks any real bargaining power vis-a-vis the provider. In markets with a handful of dominant players, the only options are to either accept the terms set out by the provider or not use the service at all.

The culmination of these factors has led many to argue that “consent” can no longer serve as a legitimate basis for the processing of personal data. Yet, for many others, the idea of consent is so deeply rooted in individual autonomy and liberty that doing away with it would require a fundamental rethink of how we understand the right to privacy. The middle-path perhaps lies in building a robust set of data protection principles and accountability mechanisms, which would apply irrespective of whether the user’s consent has been obtained. To some extent, the draft Personal Data Protection Bill also tries to achieve this, even though it retains a central role for consent. At the same time, we need privacy policies to be better drafted and designed, keeping in mind the differential needs of different categories of Indian users.

Consent in the digital world will never be perfect but we cannot stop trying to make it as meaningful as possible.

Smriti Parsheera is a fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP). This is based on a NIPFP Working Paper titled “Disclosures in privacy policies: Does “notice and consent” work?”

Source: Hindustan Times, 21/08/2019

Student suicides have spiked. Policies must be geared to decrease stress

According to a 2017 study published in the Asian Journal of Psychiatry, 37.7%, 13.1%, and 2.4% of the students were suffering from moderate, severe, and extremely severe depression in universities.

More than 400 students (under 18 years) committed suicide in Delhi between 2014 and 2018, a petition filed in the Supreme Court has revealed. A public interest litigation (PIL), filed by Gaurav Kumar Bansal, requested the SC to direct all Indian states to plan, design, formulate and implement health programmes to prevent and reduce suicides. For a long time, mental health challenges were considered a taboo subject in India. But, in the last few years, there has been, at least in urban India, growing public awareness around the issue. Parliament has also passed the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017, which ensures that every person shall have the right to access mental health care and treatment from mental health services, run or funded by the government.

Despite this, the situation in campuses is worrying. According to a 2017 study published in the Asian Journal of Psychiatry, 37.7%, 13.1%, and 2.4% of the students were suffering from moderate, severe, and extremely severe depression in universities. Experts say that college and university students are susceptible because this is a critical transitory period when they go from adolescence to adulthood. This is also the time when students are also trying to fit in new campuses, ensure good grades, and plan for the future. Unfortunately, only a few top universities help students negotiate these challenges.

Universities usually take the counselling approach to tackle mental health issues. But this is inadequate, since it tends to put the onus on students to tackle the problem. Instead the strategy should be to invest in a preventive system that decreases stress. Addressing the root cause is critical because India doesn’t have adequate funds (only 0.06% of the health budget is devoted to mental health) and trained personnel to tackle the burgeoning number of mental health cases.

Source: Hindustan Times, 20/08/2019

IIT Delhi incubated startup Sanfe launches reusable sanitary pads

With the increasing amount of plastic waste in the society created by the Sanitary Pads, Sanfe an IIT Delhi-incubated Startup has developed Reusable Pads.

Sanfe, IIT Delhi-incubated startup for designing and developing products for improving female health and hygiene, today forayed into the sanitary napkin/pad segment with the launch of first Reusable Sanitary Pads, made with composite banana fiber, which can last upto two years (around 120 washes).

Sanfe Reusable Pad is developed by Archit Agarwal (CEO and Co-founder) and Harry Sehrawat (COO and Co-founder), based on inputs from several IIT Delhi Professors. The reusable pads are ultra-thin and are highly absorbent with Quadrant True Lock Technology which makes the pad leakproof and avoids creating any rashes. A patent has also been filed for the design. A pack of two pads is priced at Rs. 199.

These reusable sanitary pads can be used multiple times (upto 120 times) after washing them in cold water with detergent after every use. A Reusable Sanitary Pad is made up of four layers of different fabrics.

1. Polyester Pilling - This fabric is highly wicking and doesn’t absorb the fluid, giving a dry experience throughout the day time.

2. Terry and Banana Fibers including viscose and Polyester Fibers - This part is highly absorbent, soaking and absorbing all the fluids making napkins highly absorbent.

3. Cotton Polyurethane Laminate - This is a breathable layer with water resistant properties giving leak-proof experience.

With these reusable sanitary pads, Sanfe is trying to address the huge problem of disposable pad waste burdening our planet. According to Menstrual Hygiene Alliance of India (MHAI) there are almost 336 million menstruating women in India, of which 36% use disposable sanitary pads summing up to 121 million. India has approximately 12.3 billion disposable sanitary napkins to be taken care of every year, and a majority of these are non-biodegradable. Most of these sanitary napkins are made of synthetic materials and plastic, which can take more than 50-60 years to decompose. This enormous amount of menstrual waste is usually dumped in landfills, thrown in open spaces and water bodies, burnt, buried (shallow burial) or flushed down toilets. These disposal techniques create a hazard for the environment. For instance, burning releases carcinogenic fumes in the form of dioxins creating an air pollution hazard, putting this waste in landfills only adds to the burden of waste, and so on.

In African Countries, Government Bodies, NGOs and UN Bodies have adapted to reusable pads which is a part of Sustainable Menstrual Hygiene and started distributing the pads to school girls making the switch to reusable pads.

#IBleedGreen Movement

Speaking on the occasion of the launch Archit Aggarwal, Founder Sanfe and B.Tech student at IIT Delhi said, “Due to the taboo around it, women hygiene has been neglected in thought and talk. With our innovations in women hygiene, we want to empower women and make their life simpler. Even for women welfare, Government and NGOs regularly distribute subsidized disposable sanitary napkins in rural and semi urban areas which is a huge cost and harm to environment accounting only for a short term solution. We urge these organizations to switch to Reusable Pads under #IBleedGreen movement and can save upto 75% of the cost.

Prof. Srinivasan Venkataraman, Assistant Professor in the Department of Design at IIT Delhi commended the efforts of Sanfe. “This startup has carved a niche in the domain of women healthcare and hygiene with the launch of another useful product. All the products of Sanfe cater to the important needs of women, use simple science and are sold at affordable prices in the market.”

Mr Sanjay Kumar, Chief General Manager - Business Development at Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL), Mumbai said, the premier technical institutes like IITs and their incubated companies are well known for coming up with path-breaking and revolutionary innovations. Sanfe located at The Technology Business Incubator (TBI) of IIT Delhi is one such organization that has been undertaking excellent and responsible work in feminine hygiene and wellness space. As HPCL stands by the progressive thinking and meaningful innovations, particularly towards empowering women, it will explore ways to jointly popularize the reusable period care product range under the flagship initiative of Government of India - Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. We congratulate the Sanfe team for this innovation and wish them grand success.

Source; Hindustan Times, 20/08/2019