4. Itihaasa (history) of Analytics in India

Data Chatter

Analytics and Data Science have become mainstream career choices for graduating students in India nowadays. Analytics companies are nowadays among the largest recruiters at engineering colleges.

How did we get here? How did data and analytics become so big, and so mainstream in India? In order to understand this, we need to understand the full history of analytics in India, and this is a story that goes back over a hundred years.

Today’s guest is N Dayasindhu, co-founder and CEO of itihaasa Research and Digital. For the past two decades, he has been working on R&D and innovation management especially focused on IT. He is working on the evolution of business and technology focused on IT and related domains in the Indian context. In an earlier avatar, he was a consultant advising MNCs setting up high-performance R&D and IT organizations in India.

He was also a researcher in the R&D arm at Infosys and holds a couple of US patents. His research is published in Technology Forecasting and Social Change, Technovation, ACM SIGMIS, etc. He occasionally writes in The Indian Express, The Hindu,The Economic Times, The Hindu Business Line, Founding Fuel, etc. He has guest lectured in the IIMs, the Wharton School at UPenn, NUS Singapore, etc.

He has an FPM (PhD) from IIM Bangalore, M.Sc. in Physics from IIT Madras and a B.Sc. in Physics from Loyola College, Chennai.

Show Notes:

00:03:20 - PC Mahalanobis returns to India (1910s)

00:12:30 - Using analytics for engineering problems at IISc (1950s) https://ece.iisc.ac.in/index.php/about-us/history

00:23:00 - Analytics in the industry in India (1960s)

00:33:00 - Big tech coming into India (1980s)

00:35:30 - GE sets up captive in India (1990s)

00:39:45 - Analytics services startups; IT firms get into analytics (ealrly 2000s)

00:49:30 - Analytics training institutes in India (2010s)

00:52:00 - How to characterise analytics professionals in India

Links

Dayasindhu on Twitter

Dayasindhu’s interview with L^2, the alumni magazine of IIM Bangalore

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Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".
The podcast is hosted by Karthik Shashidhar. He is a blogger, newspaper columnist, book author and a former data and strategy consultant. Karthik currently heads Analytics and Business Intelligence for Delhivery, one of India’s largest logistics companies.
You can follow him on twitter at @karthiks, and read his blog at noenthuda.com/blog