Asok Mitra, popularly known as the 'father of Indian Census', frequented the library of Kumar for books on a number of subjects. His passion was agro –economy, a subject not held in respect in earlier days. He collected books on Agro Economy like the Annals of Rural Bengal by W W Hunter. Later he left Calcutta for Delhi and wrote to my father for rare books. By then his interest had broadened. Books not only on Agro-economy and Census but also on arts, painting anthropology and others. Asok Mitra Served Indian Civil Service from 1940 to 1975. He is the author of Census Reports of West Bengal and India, District Gazetteers of West Bengal. Fondly remembered as as ‘Census Mitra’,and ‘Pandit Mitra’ , his iexpertise in the census analysis often went beyond the confines of demography to directly caution to the state on the deteriorating decline of the female sex ratio in India. He inspired and guided the social scientists of his time and radically changed the pattern of demographic research to give it a shift from mere data analysis to one of social concern . To go back to history, it was in 1961 that a distinguished scholar-administrator (Asok Mitra) who was one of the last ICS officers in independent India, put the Indian census on the world map by introducing new concepts and classifications, more detailed tabulations, special tables for scheduled caste and scheduled tribes and also for large cities, collecting a wide range of
ancillary data, setting up a map division to undertake extensive mapping, and a social studies division to undertake anthropological studies and analyze ‘social and cultural’ tables.