Former petroleum secretary Vijay Kelkar has been elected president of the prestigious Indian Statistical Institute (ISI). Kelkar succeeded former RBI governor C Rangarajan.

He was elected at the general body meeting of the institute, which functions under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.

Do you know?

• Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) is an academic institute of national importance as recognised by a 1959 act of the Indian parliament. It grew out of the Statistical Laboratory set up by Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis in Presidency College, Kolkata.

• Established in 1931, this public university of India is one of the oldest and most prestigious institutions focused on statistics, and its early reputation led it to being adopted as a model for the first US institute of Statistics set up at the Research Triangle, North Carolina by Gertrude Mary Cox.

• ISI has its headquarters in Baranagar, a suburb of Kolkata, West Bengal. ISI functions under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI) of the Government of India.

• Key areas of expertise of ISI are Computer science, Statistics, Mathematics, Mathematical economics, Operations Research and Information Science and it is one of the few research oriented Indian schools offering courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level.