Hira L. Koul, President of the Indian Statistical Association, writes: The Indian Statistical Association was established in 1960 at Bombay (now Mumbai). The late Professor M.C. Chakrabarty, the founding Head of the Department of Statistics, University of Bombay, was its first Secretary and Prof. A. M. Kshirsagar was the first President. Chakrabarty played a key role in establishing the Association and starting and running its journal, the Journal of the Indian Statistical Association (JISA: http://stats.unipune.ernet.in/jisa.html). Besides publishing this journal, the Association also organizes and supports conferences, workshops, and meetings in India. The current president and secretary of the Association are Hira L. Koul and Uttara V. Naik-Nimbalkar, respectively. A more detailed account of the Association can be found in the following articles: Adke, S.R. (2010). An early history of ISA and JISA, JISA, 48, 181–188; Chakrabarty, M.C. (2010). My pilgrimage to Bombay, JISA, 48, 171–178 (written some time in 1960–61); and Kshirsagar, A.M. (1972). Professor M.C. Chakrabarty, JISA, 10, 1–8.

The first issue of JISA was published in January, 1963, with Chakrabarty being the Chief Editor of the Journal until his premature death in 1972. Subsequently, the late V.S. Huzurbazar and S.R. Adke were appointed as the Chief Editor and Secretary in 1972, respectively. Professor Adke streamlined the journal during 1972–1980 and also helped to create a sound financial corpus for the Association. Naik-Nimbalkar is the current Chief Editor of the JISA.

This year JISA is completing its fifty years. To celebrate the event, a special Golden Jubilee volume of the journal containing the following papers is being published.
1. N. Balakrishna and A. J. Lawrance. Development of product autoregressive model.
2. A. Bose, R. S. Hazra and K. Saha. Extremum of circulant type matrices: a survey.
3. A. Chatterjee and P. Hall. High dimensional classification when useful information comes from many, perhaps all features.
4. Y.P. Chaubey, J. Li, A. Sen and P. K. Sen A new smooth density estimator for non-negative random variables
5. R. Dutta, M. Bogdan and J. K Ghosh Model selection and multiple testing – A Bayes and empirical Bayes overview and some new results.
6. A. K. Jammalamadaka and S. R. Jammalamadaka A growth curve approach to analyzing multiple-valued expression data.
7. S.N. Lahiri, X.L. Nguyen, J. Yang, Z. Zhu, and P. Banerjee. Wireless sensor networks: Statistical issues and challenges
8. S.H. Ong and A. SenGupta. Bivariate and multivariate circular distributions by mixtures.
9. B. L. S. P. Rao. Test for dominance between mean functions for two-sample functional data.
10. G. A. Satten and S. Datta. Minimum distance type estimation of transformation parameters.
11. A. Schick and W. Wefelmeyer. Convergence in weighted L1-norms of convolution estimators for the response density in nonparametric regression.
12. W. Stute and T. L. Anh. Principal component analysis of martingale residuals
13. T. Umashanger, T. N. Sriram, and J. Lee. Simultaneous robust estimation in finite mixtures: The continuous case.
14. P. Vellaisamy Simpsons paradox and collapsibility