Q.Trace briefly the history of national income estimation in India. Who is generally credited with the first scientific estimate?

India's national income estimation has moved from individual scholarly attempts to a full institutional system over roughly a century and a half.

The earliest widely cited attempt to estimate India's income was made by Dadabhai Naoroji in the late nineteenth century, mainly to make the political case about the economic drain under colonial rule; given the absence of systematic data at the time, it was necessarily approximate.

The estimate generally regarded as the first scientific one — based on an explicit, stated method rather than rough approximation — was made by Prof. V. K. R. V. Rao in the early 1930s, covering the year 1931-32.

After independence, the Government of India appointed the National Income Committee (1949), with members including P. C. Mahalanobis, D. R. Gadgil and V. K. R. V. Rao himself, to put national income estimation on a permanent, institutional footing rather than relying on individual scholars. This led to the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO), which for decades compiled India's official National Accounts Statistics. …

Students sometimes credit Naoroji's estimate as the 'scientific' one, or confuse the CSO with the NSO — remember the CSO was t …