Partha Majumder has spent the better part of 72 years on Kolkata’s Barrackpore Trunk Road—first as a student, then as a researcher, then as faculty, and now as an emeritus professor at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI). Of late, though, things have been pretty different.

In one of the meetings of the Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation (Mospi), Majumdar was invited to discuss the future of the country’s leading statistical institute. Out of India at the time, he couldn’t make the meeting at Bengaluru’s Jawaharlal Nehru Centre. So he asked them to send him the........

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