CHAPTER ONE Introduction — Meaning and Scope and Development of Stati: . Statistics, in a sense, is as old as the human society itself. Jts origin can be waced to the old days when it was regarded as the ‘science of State-craft’ and.was the by-product of the administrative activity of the State. The word ‘Statistics’ seems to have been-derived from the Latin word ‘status’ or the Italian word ‘statista’ or the German word ‘statistik’ each of which means a ‘political state’. In ancient times, the government used to collect -the information regarding the population and ‘property or wealth’ of the country — the farmer enabling the government to have an idea of the manpower of the country (to safeguard itself against external aggression, if any), and the latter providing it a basis for inuroducing news taxes and levies. In India, an efficient system of collecting official and administrative statistics existed even more than 2,000 years ago, in particular, during the reign of Chandra Gupta Maurya ( 324 -300 B.C.). From Kautilya’s Arthshastra it is known that even before 300 B.C. a very good system of collecting ‘Vital Statistics’ and registration of births and deaths was in vogue. During Akbar’s reign ( 1556 - 1605 A.D.), Raja Todarmal, the then. land and revenue minister, maintained good records of land and agricultural statistics. In Aina-e-Akbari written by Abul Fazl (in 1596 - 97 ), one of the nine gems of Akbar, we find detailed accounts of the administrative and statistical surveys conducted during Akbar’s reign. In Germany, the systematic collection of official statistics originated towards the end of the 18thcentury when, in ofder to have an idea of the relative strength of different German States, information regarding population and output — in- dustrial and agricultural - was collected. In England, statistics were the outcome of Napoleonic Wars. The Wars necessitated the systematic collection of numerical data to enable the government to assess the revenues and expenditure with greater precision and then to levy new taxes in order to mect the cost of war. Seventeenth century saw the. origin of the ‘Vital Statistics.’ Captain John Grant of London (1620 - 1674 ) , known as the ‘father’ of Vital Statistics, was the firstman to study the statistics of births and deaths. Computation of moruality tables and the calculation of expectation of life at different ages by a number of persons, viz., Casper Newman, ‘Sir William Petty (1623 - 1687 ), James Dodson, Dr. Price, to mention only a few, led to the idea of ‘life insurance’ and the first life insurance institution was founded in London in 1698. The theoretical development of the so-called modem statistics came during the mid-seventeenth century with the introduction of ‘Theory of Probability’ and ‘Theory of Games and Chance’, the chief contributors being mathematicians and gamblers of France, Germany and England. The French mathematician Pascal (1623 - 1662 ), after lengthy correspondence with another French mathematician