In the 4th episode, Karthik speaks to Dr. N Dayasindhu who gives a fascinating historical account of data analytics in India. I mean there are so many threads in India.
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.
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
Do check Dayasindhu’s fascinating work – Itihasa which is chronicling and archiving history of Indian IT industry.
Mostly Economics 
