New Delhi: The government is set to introduce a bill in the Lok Sabha to widen the remit of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) and align its legal framework with evolving needs.
The Indian Statistical Institute Bill, 2026, seeks the institute's incorporation as a ' body corporate ' to strengthen its governance, promote academic excellence and research, and allow it to serve the emerging needs in the field of Statistics and allied fields.
The bill says the President of India will be the visitor of the institute and provisions for a Board of Governors that will be its principal policy executive body. The board will be headed by the chairperson, who will be an eminent person from the field of academia, industry, education, public policy, and Statistical sciences.
The bill says that the board will be accountable to the central government.
The institute will have an Academic Council, which will act as a principal academic body and will be headed by the institute's director. All full-time professors and full-time faculty will be members of the Academic Council.
The ISI Act,1959, declared the institute to be an institution of national importance and empowered it to grant degrees and diplomas in Statistics. The Act was amended in 1995 to empower the Institute to grant degrees and diplomas in Statistics.
The legal reform will enable an ecosystem to train a new generation of high-quality data scientists and statisticians, bringing the massive talent gap currently facing India's tech and financial sectors, the bill says.
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