and private sectors in India. By the 1940s, the ISI was internationally known and was taken as a model when the first institute of statistics was set up in the United States by Gertrude Coxperhaps the only time an institute in a developing country was used as a model in a developed country. As asked by the government of India, in 1950, ISI designed and planned a comprehensive socio–economic national sample survey covering rural India. The organisation named National Sample Survey (NSS) was founded in 1950 for conducting this survey. The field work was performed by the Directorate of NSS, functioning under the Ministry of Finance, whereas the other tasks such as planning of the survey, training of field workers, review, data processing and tabulation were executed by ISI. In 1961, the Directorate of NSS started functioning under the Department of Statistics of government of India, and later in 1971, the design and analysis wing of NSS was shifted from ISI to the Department of Statistics forming the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO). J. B. S. Haldane joined the ISI as a research professor from August 1957, and stayed on until February 1961, when he had a falling out with ISI Director P.C. Mahalanobis over Haldane's going on a much-publicized hunger strike to protest the United States pressuring U.S. National Science Fair winners Gary Botting and Susan Brown from attending an ISI banquet to which many prominent Indian scientists had been invited. Haldane helped the ISI grow in biometrics. Haldane also played a key role in developing the structure and content of the courses offered by ISI. Until 1959, ISI was associated with the University of Calcutta. By 'The Indian Statistical Institute Act 1959' of the Parliament of India, amended in 1995, ISI was declared an institute of national importance, and was authorised to hold examinations and to grant degrees and diplomas in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Economics, and in any other subject related to statistics as identified by the institute from time to time. ISI is a public university, as the same act also states that ISI would be funded by the Central Government of India. ISI had by the 1960s started establishing special service units in New Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad to provide consultancy services to business, industry and governmental public service organisations in the areas of statistical process control, operations research and industrial engineering.