Department's Profile. . .

The postgraduate Department of Statistics started functioning from July, 1941 with Prof. P.C Mahalanobis as the Head of the Department and Prof.R.C. Bose and Prof.S.N. Roy as regular faculty members. Housed in the College Street campus of the University and having a bare minimum of physical facilities, it became the first full fledged department in the country offering a post-graduate degree in Statistics.

Among six students of the first batch who completed their post-graduation from the Department were Prof H.K. Nandi and Prof. C.R.Rao, the two illustrious sons of the Department, who were destined to become leading researchers in statistics in the coming decades. From this inception the Department set a very high standard of teaching and research. Illustrious teachers and researchers like Professors P.K.Bose, H.K.Nandi, A. Bhattacharya, B.N.Ghosh, M.N.Ghosh, C.R.Rao and K.R.Nair figured in the list of faculty members in the first decade of its existance. Fundamental contributions to different feilds of statistics made by them during this period earned a tremendous reputation for the Department as a breeding ground of top quality statisticians.

The Department is still considered to be one of the best statistics Department in the country in terms of  its research output, curriculum, teaching and student quality. Its  curriculum is a model to the other universities and it is the first department in the country to design two new courses a few years back viz. ‘statistics for development’ and ‘evolution of statistical concepts’ and later these were introduced  the M.Sc. syllabus. The students of the department have been consistently doing well in the Indian Statistical Service Examination conducted by UPSC and Ph.D. entrance tests like NET, GATE.

The strength of the Department, however, lies in its continual search for excellence and for its endeavour to adapt itself to the changing scenario of Statistics as a subject and to keep abreast with the best in the emerging fields.