M. P. Parameswaran

M. P. Parameswaran was born on 18 January 1935 at Kiralur in Thrissur district, in what was then the Kingdom of Cochin. He had his early schooling in Thrissur, including at the Namboothiri Vidyalayam and the Church Mission Society Higher Secondary School, and completed his pre-degree course at St. Thomas College, Thrissur.

He went on to the College of Engineering in Thiruvananthapuram, graduating in electrical engineering in 1956. In 1957 he joined the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Bombay as a scientist. He later studied in the Soviet Union and received a PhD in nuclear engineering from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute in 1965.

Parameswaran worked as a scientist at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre from 1957 to 1975. Between 1969 and 1973 he was on deputation to the State Institute of Languages in Kerala as its Assistant Director. There he was instrumental in designing the layout of the Malayalam keyboard for typewriters, which was later adopted in the Inscript keyboard layout used on computers.

In 1975 he resigned from the research centre to work full time for the Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad. Under his leadership the Parishad grew into a broad people's movement. He promoted village science, decentralisation and intermediate technologies suited to local needs, among them the smokeless stove meant to replace smoky firewood stoves in homes. After the Bhopal gas disaster of 1984 he mobilised around a thousand Parishad volunteers for a Science Train campaign on industry, science and environmental safety.

He took the movement to a national stage. In 1987 he was convener of the National Organising Committee of the Bharat Jan Vigyan Jatha, a countrywide science communication campaign, and he helped set up the All India People's Science Network, serving as its secretary and later its president. In 1990 he helped organise the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Jatha in support of the National Literacy Mission, which led to the formation of the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti and the mass literacy campaigns that followed. His ideas also fed into Kerala's literacy campaign and the People's Planning process of decentralised development.

He was a prolific writer of popular science in Malayalam and English, covering radioactivity, nuclear energy, astronomy, mathematics, ecology, education, politics and development, and he wrote hundreds of articles. He received Government of India awards for books for new readers in 1962 and for basic and cultural literature in 1964, and an award for children's literature. His later books included Janakeeya Sasthra Prasthanam, published in 2008.

For 33 years Parameswaran was an active member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and a well known theorist of the Left in Kerala. His book on a Fourth World, later published as Fourth World: Dream and Reality, set out a vision of socialism built on decentralised democracy, local production, environmental protection and a rejection of consumerism. The party saw it as a departure from Marxist principles, and after a long and public debate it expelled him in February 2004 for indiscipline and deviation from the party line. He continued to speak and write on alternative development and scientific temper for the rest of his life.

In 2007 he appeared in the Malayalam film AKG, about the communist leader A. K. Gopalan, playing E. M. S. Namboodiripad, Kerala's first chief minister. He lived in Thrissur in his later years. Little else about his private life has been published.

M. P. Parameswaran died at his residence in Thrissur on Tuesday 11 August 2026, aged 91. Some reports gave his age as 92. The cause of death was not made public.

Tributes came from across Kerala's public life. Former chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan called his death a major loss to the state's scientific, cultural and social spheres, and said he had dedicated his life to taking science closer to ordinary people and promoting scientific temper and rational thinking. He added that Parameswaran had given up the opportunities and privileges he could have enjoyed as a nuclear scientist and chosen the path of social activism.

Parameswaran is remembered as one of the defining figures of the people's science movement in India and a bridge between the scientific establishment and grassroots campaigns. The Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad, the All India People's Science Network and the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti all carry the mark of his organising, and he helped launch the mass literacy campaigns of the 1990s.

The Malayalam keyboard layout he helped design lives on in the Inscript standard used on computers, and his Fourth World ideas remain a reference point in debates on decentralisation and development in Kerala. In 2022 the Government of Kerala honoured him with the Kerala Sree award in the first year of the state's civilian honours.