India's Food Challenge: Counting Crops and Catching Up

After India gained independence, there was a huge worry about having enough food. Leaders realized they needed data to solve this problem. They wanted to know how much food was being produced and if it was enough for everyone. A man named P. C. Mahalanobis came up with a clever idea. He used a method called random sampling to estimate the amount of food being grown. This involved cutting crops in fields to make a guess. However, things got complicated because different regions had different ways of counting money. Some places did it one way, while others did it another way. Additionally, the people who worked with numbers often argued about who was right. Some Indian experts even got help from British experts, which made things even more confusing. All this made it very hard to get accurate numbers about food production. Even by the late 1950s, India wasn't sure if their data was correct. It wasn't until then that they started using the right tools to count food properly.