QUEST FOR EXCELLENCE

Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) harnesses the power of SAS for Economic, Technological, Social, Political and Ecological research

Objective
The Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) was established by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for carrying out advanced research on policy and development issues from a multi-disciplinary perspective.

With a total of 135 faculty and M.Sc/M.Phil/Ph.D students, IGIDR has a clear mandate of gaining insights into the process of development & alternate policy options, and to disseminate the knowledge so gained.

With the primary objective of promoting & conducting research, and to serve as a centre for promoting co-operative endeavor & interaction between research scholars and institutions in India and abroad, IGIDR has been focusing on providing the platform that can further economic, technological, social, political and ecological research in the country.

With these underlying objectives, it was imperative for IGIDR to deploy a software that is catalytic in enriching research data and streamlining complex analyses conducted by students and the faculty.

The Challenge: Data Analysis
Given the need to handle datasets containing a large number of observations and many variables, there was a distinct urgency of having software that could facilitate meaningful analysis. Such software had to offer features like usability, manageability, and above all, interoperability across diverse platforms. A solution that could save time, was user-friendly, and could integrate & communicate with all existing software, was need of the hour at IGIDR. SAS was an ideal choice under such circumstances.

Why SAS?
Explaining the rationale behind the choice of SAS for conducting research, Mr. Lingaraj Panda, Systems Analyst, IGIDR said, “SAS has wide applications. It has in-built process as well as the IML module that allows users to build complex custom analyses on their own. SAS Macros are very powerful and can do repetitive code generation.”

Key Benefits
SAS Software at IGIDR has contributed to the enhancement of presentation of research output. Empowered with the power of SAS, the research community at IGIDR can now perform complex analyses as part of their research & development efforts. With SAS, programming time has reduced substantially for faculty and students.

According to Mr. Lingaraj Panda, Systems Analyst, IGIDR, “SAS contributes a lot towards the vast research work done by researchers & students at IGIDR. SAS as a solution allows us to handle wide range of statistical and mathematical problems. To some extent, SAS reduces the need of having multiple packages for different needs.”