From Kiralur to the laboratory

Kiralur, a village in the Thrissur district of Kerala, was for most of its history the sort of place that produced farmers, priests and schoolteachers rather than nuclear engineers. It was there, on 18 January 1935, that Meleveettil Parameswaran was born into a conservative Namboothiri household, in what was then the princely state of Cochin. The caste identity attached to that birth was something he would set aside deliberately while still a student, dropping the family suffix from his name in college. It was an early sign of the pattern that would define him: an unwillingness to accept an inherited position simply because it had been handed to him.

He was educated in Thrissur, moving through a Namboothiri school, a mission high school and St Thomas College, before taking a degree in engineering at the College of Engineering in Thiruvananthapuram, which he completed in 1956. The following year he joined the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre at Trombay, near Bombay, at a moment when India's atomic energy programme was being assembled almost from scratch and young engineers were being sent abroad for advanced training. Parameswaran was sent to the Soviet Union, and in 1965 he earned a doctorate in nuclear engineering from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute.

By any conventional measure he had arrived. He was a doctorate-holding nuclear scientist inside the country's flagship scientific institution, in an era when that carried enormous prestige. Between 1969 and 1973 he also served as an assistant director of the State Institute of Languages in Kerala, an early indication that the communication of knowledge interested him as much as its production.

Walking away from the reactor

In 1975 Parameswaran resigned from his scientific career and went home to Kerala to work full time with the Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad. The decision baffled many of his colleagues. The Parishad at that point was still largely a forum of science writers and teachers concerned with putting scientific material into Malayalam; what he saw in it was the raw material of a mass movement.

Under his influence and that of his colleagues, the organisation was transformed. It moved from writing about science to using science as a political and social instrument, taking positions on dams, forests, factories, sanitation, health and schooling, and insisting that ordinary people had both the right and the capacity to interrogate technical decisions made on their behalf. The question that ran through his work was not whether a project was technically feasible but who it was actually for. Development, in his argument, was not a neutral good that experts delivered to a passive population; it was a set of choices with winners and losers, and those affected deserved a seat at the table where the choices were made.

That conviction placed him inside some of Kerala's defining public arguments. He and the Parishad were central to the long campaign to protect the Silent Valley rainforest from a hydroelectric project, a fight that became a landmark in Indian environmental history, and he remained engaged in later disputes over river projects in the state. Crucially, the opposition was never framed as anti-science. It was framed as better science, made public and made accountable.

Literacy, planning and the People's Science Movement

Parameswaran's ambitions were never confined to Kerala. In 1987 he convened the national organising committee for the Bharat Jan Vigyan Jatha, a countrywide science communication march, and in October and November 1990 he was instrumental in mounting the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Jatha in support of the National Literacy Mission. Out of that mobilisation came the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti, which carried mass literacy campaigning across India on a scale rarely attempted before. He was also among the founding figures of the All India People's Science Network, which knitted together scattered regional organisations into a national federation.

He was a prolific writer in the service of these campaigns rather than in spite of them, producing twenty-nine popular science books in Malayalam and two in English. His work for new readers and for basic cultural literature was recognised with Government of India awards in 1962 and 1964, and he received a children's literature award in 1982. Kerala later honoured him with the Kerala Sree award. The audience he wrote for was the school leaver, the farmer, the newly literate adult, not the specialist.

The Fourth World and a break with the party

Parameswaran was a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) for thirty-three years, and his political thinking eventually outgrew what the party was prepared to accommodate. From the 1990s he developed what he called the Fourth World idea, published in English as a book on socialism for the twenty-first century and elaborated in Malayalam writing afterwards. It argued for a socialism built upward from villages and neighbourhoods rather than downward from a central state, organised around ecological limits, decentralised power and direct participation in planning. The book triggered a fierce debate in Kerala and in Left circles nationally, and in 2004 he was expelled from the party over it.

He did not retreat into bitterness. He kept writing, kept lecturing and kept working with the Parishad, and produced an autobiography, Kaalaharanamillatha Swapnangal, along with expositions of dialectical materialism and a later reconsideration of his own Fourth World thesis.

Legacy

M. P. Parameswaran died at his home in Thrissur on 11 August 2026, aged ninety-one. What he left behind is unusual in Indian public life: not an institution bearing his name but a habit of mind spread across a state. The idea that villagers can read a project report, that literacy is a political act, that scientists owe an account of themselves to the people whose lives their work reshapes, all of it carries his fingerprints. He began as an engineer building reactors and ended as the man who taught a state to ask who development is for. The village of Kiralur has claim to one of the most consequential Indian thinkers of his generation.