Indera Paul Singh

Singh died at the age of 88 years on 27 September 2016.

University of Oxford's Philip Stewart in 1991, while reviewing Singh's contributions to the first issue of commencing volume of the Journal of Human Ecology, noted that while at that time there was lack of "synthesis" between the two greatly varying approaches towards the study of human ecology – "biological adaptations" and "cultural adaptations" – Singh had worked on both of them. Stewart also pointed out some areas of studies where Singh could have done better.

He had been Indian Social Science Academy's fellow, and had served as a member of the Asian Association of Bioethics (Tokyo), International Commission of Urban Anthropology, International Commission on Documentation, American Anthropological Association, Indian Academy of Sciences, and International Council for Scientific Development; and as the president of the Indian Anthropological Association, Indian Society for Human Ecology, and Indian Dermatoglyphic Association; and as the regional commissioner for the South Asia Regional Group of the International Commission on the Anthropology of Food and Food Problems, and as the associate secretary general of International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences; and as the secretary general of the Tenth International Congress of Anthropological Sciences and the Indian Science Congress Association (1975).

From February to June 1953, Singh worked as a research assistant for Oscar Lewis who was doing a field study in Rampur, a Jat-populated village, at Delhi in India with financial grant from the Ford Foundation's behavioral sciences division. He served the Department of Anthropology of the University of Delhi as a lecturer from 1953 to 1961, as a reader from 1953 to 1967, and as a professor from 1961 to 1971. He had been the head of the department from 16 June 1968 to 6 June 1979, and from 4 April 1981 to 3 April 1984. He was dean of the university's Faculty of Science from 1971 to 1975, and from 1983 to 1984, and university's proctor from 1973 to 1992. He was a member of the university's court from 1959 to 1993, of the executive council from 1973 to 1992, and of the academic council for over twenty years. He was also a member of India's University Grants Commission.

Singh's and Mohinder Kumar Bhasin's coauthored book Anthropometry (1968) was assessed by Edward Eyre Hunt Jr. He viewed the approach of the authors as being similar to anthropometry's German subculture in spite of the book's origination at the University of Delhi, noting that P. C. Biswas (the founder of University of Delhi's Department of Anthropology) had received training from Eugen Fischer in Berlin. He suggested that "by and large" their work was "good" but expressed concerns over the its "relevance to present-day research and training" in biological anthropology.

Singh did Intermediate of Science in medical stream at the Hindu College of the University of Delhi in India, and completed his master's in anthropology from the university in 1950. From 1950 to 1952, he obtained "specialized training in anthropology" at the Franz Weidenreich Anthropological Institute of Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. In 1959, he became the first ever student of the University of Delhi to obtain a Ph.D. with a specialty in anthropology.

Indera Paul Singh (20 January 1928 – 27 September 2016) was an Indian anthropologist who had served at prominent positions in several Indian and international anthropological organizations.