Remembering Prof. P C Mahalanobis, the founder of ISI, Finance Minister Shri Mukherjee said it was he who had realized the need for launching a Statistical Quality Control (SQC) movement for large scale training of industrial managers, executives, engineers, technicians and also government officials. The Finance Minister further said that Indian Industry has benefited a lot from training and problem solving services offered by ISI at an affordable price.

Finance Minister Shri Mukherjee said that the quality movement now brings together many subjects including reliability, optimization and modelling techniques. He said that the successful applications of these techniques help industries to improve quality of whatever they do. Shri Mukherjee said that in India many sectors like pharmaceuticals, high tech manufacturing, automobiles, design engineering, IT and ITES have successfully used these techniques to improve the quality of their offerings significantly. The Finance Minister said that in many of these fields, India is now considered to be a force to reckon with – a significant change from the scenario that we had a few decades back, the Minister said.

Shri Mukherjee said that with the passage of time, the form of the quality challenge has changed. With the massive development of computing technology and the huge advancement of the internet, the availability of data has increased manifold, he said. The Finance Minister said that the quality requirements also have become very stringent and now there is a lot of focus on various services and on areas like marketing and human resources. He said that this has required new techniques and approaches to be developed and researchers and practitioners in this field have experimented with many approaches. The Finance Minister further said that the Indian Statistical Institute has played a key role in this area by promoting application of statistical methodologies in many areas. Even within industries these methodologies are being used in hitherto untapped areas like finance, sales, advertisements, customer relationship management and security, said the Minister.