Jervoise Athelstane Baines

Sir Jervoise Athelstane Baines, CSI, (17 October 1847 - 26 November 1925) was an administrator in the Indian Civil Service during the period of the British Raj.

Baines was the son of Edward Baines, the vicar of Yalding in Kent, and his wife, Catherine Eularia Baines. He was born on 17 October 1847 in the village of Bluntisham in the former English county of Huntingdonshire. He was educated at Rugby School and at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1868, he passed the competitive examination for entry into the Indian Civil Service, spent two years in training and was then posted to the Bombay Presidency.

Baines arrived in India in 1870, approximately halfway through the five-year-long attempt to collect statistical population data, which was the first such exercise by the Raj administration. In 1881, he was deputy superintendent of the census in the Presidency and excelled to the degree that he was appointed Census Commissioner for the national census of 1891. He had worked as an assistant collector and magistrate at Poona from 1883 and held various other posts while in India. Baines spent much of his time organising the censuses and also analysing and producing reports based on their data, which were "widely recognised as the work of a brilliant ethnographer and statistician", according to an obituary published in Nature. For the 1891 census, Baines changed the classification from that which had been used in the exercise of 1881. His obituary in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society describes the changes as being "first the separation of caste from religion and, secondly, the substitution of the population subsisting by an occupation for that exercising it." He wrote the resultant 300-page General Report. His work influenced that of his successors, such as H. H. Risley and Edward Gait, and his obituary in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society noted that

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