In his inaugural address for Statistics Day 2010, India's vice president Shri M Hamid Ansari recognised the continuing central role the discipline has to play in the nation's development and highlighted the importance of the day's theme, Child Statistics.

Ansari commented that India's 440 million children constitute 42 per cent of its population and about one-fifth of the world’s total of children. These young citizens "constitute a potential demographic resource that could propel the nation to higher orbits of economic progress and human development. Realising the potential, however, is neither a given nor automatic," he noted.

"The reality is in stark contrast. Every third malnourished child in the world lives in India; every second Indian child is under weight; three out of four children in India are anaemic; and every second new born has reduced learning capacity due to iodine deficiency," he said.

Ansari praised former chief statistician Dr Pronab Sen's initiative to coordinate various ministries and government departments dealing with child-related issues and set up an India Forum on Child Statistics.

The forum will act as an institutional mechanism to "foster coordination and collaboration and improve the credibility and transparency in the collection and reporting of statistical data on our children and the families they come from. This should enable compilation and tracking of national indicators on the well-being of our children across all population segments and presentation of data in terms understood by non-technical audiences."

The vice president conferred the National Award in Statistics to renowned statistician Prof Aloke Dey of the Indian Statistical Institute. The award is given to a senior statistician to recognise a lifetime's contribution in applied/official statistics, "significantly benefiting the Indian official system in the past and/or in the future". Instituted in the memory of Prof P V Sukhatme (an RSS Guy Silver medalist in 1962), the award carries a cash prize of Rs 3 Lakhs (£4,280 at 29 June exchange rates) and a citation.

Ansari also paid tribute to the late Prof Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis whose birth anniversary Statistics Day commemorates. (Mahalanobis was made an Honorary Fellow of the RSS in 1954). Stressing the need to carry Mahalanobis's legacy forward, Ansari said "We must do everything we can to improve the working conditions and status of our statistics fraternity in the country. We must also encourage our youth to choose statistics as an academic pursuit and as a profession."