Malcolm Adiseshiah

Malcolm Sathiyanathan Adiseshiah (18 April 1910 – 21 November 1994), was an Indian development economist and educator.

Adiseshiah was born on 18 April 1910 in Vellore, Tamil Nadu.

He is the second of the five children of Paul Varanasi Adiseshiah and Grace Nesamma Adiseshiah.

His father was a professor of philosophy and the first Indian principal of Voorhees College, Vellore, Tamil Nadu State, India.

His mother was a musician who had studied up to the Senior Cambridge (High School) and was the first woman Councilor of the Vellore Municipality.

She taught her five children until they were ten years of age.

Malcolm Adiseshiah obtained a doctorate in economics at the London School of Economics, William, the eldest brother, in philosophy at Cambridge, Padmini in education, and Noble in medicine.

Adiseshiah studied in Voorhees High School, where he obtained two double promotions.

He completed his secondary school education at the age of thirteen to join Voorhees College for his ‘intermediate’ course (equivalent to +2 course now.) Then he shifted to Loyola College, Chennai, for his BA (Honours), where Ramaswamy Venkataraman, the former President of India, was his classmate.

In 1930 Adiseshiah joined as a lecturer in St. Paul's Cathedral Mission College, an affiliate of the University of Calcutta, and continued until 1936.

He worked on planning a rural service program in the college in cooperation with the Visva-Bharati University associates at Sriniketan and Santiniketan.

After a six-year teaching interregnum at the St. Paul's Cathedral Mission College in Calcutta (now Kolkata), he proceeded to King's College, Cambridge, for his MA (Banking) and then to the London School of Economics (1937–40) for pursuing his doctoral research with specialization in currency.

Late Dr. R. N. Poduval, who served in FAO and then was Chairman of Centre for Research in Economic and Social Development, Chennai, was two years his junior in LSE.

In later life, after his retirement from UNESCO, Adiseshiah recalled his training and research"

under the wise guidance of Father Basneck and Professor P.J. Thomas in Madras, Benoy Kumar and Nalini Ranjan Sarkar in Calcutta, Percy Barrat Whale and John Maynard Keynes in London and Cambridge.

In 1940, after obtaining his doctorate at the age of thirty, he joined Madras Christian College, Chennai, as its first professor and head of the economics department.

His role and support for the British government in the notorious and deadly Bengal famines of 1940s is controversial.

His publications in the 1940s included books on banking, rural development, and agricultural transformation.

He was engaged, with his fellow economists in the Madras University, in work on planning the future industrialization of India and Madras State.

Adiseshiah married Helen Paranjothi, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

Prof. K. N. Raj, founder of Centre for Developmental Studies, Tiruvananthapuram, and G. Jagathpathy, former Chief Secretary of the government of Madhya Pradesh, were his students in the 1941-44 batch of BA Honours course.

Raj recalled this experience:

in the villages of Bengal and South India with their rural service centres where we worked out the economics of hand pound rice, hand-made paper, hand-loomed textiles, crop rotation and rural credit, rural medicine and sanitation, adult literacy and curriculum reform.

It was there that I found the testing ground for the many ideas and plans that I carried with me to UNESCO in Paris and from there to the four corners of the earth.

From 1 to 16 November 1945, a United Nations Conference was convened in London to establish of an educational and cultural organization (ECO/CONF).

In the conference, a new organization was created to establish the “intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind” and thus prevent the outbreak of another world war.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was founded by thirty-seven countries.

Its Constitution to promote collaboration between member states in the fields of education, science and culture was signed on 16 November 1945 and came into force on 4 November 1946.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, former President of India, was a former student of Adiseshiah’s father.

He remained there until 1946.

The separation process with Helen Paranjothi started in 1946, and the annulment of the marriage came in 1956.

Adiseshiah then married Elizabeth Pothen, a history professor he met at the Madras Women’s Christian College.

From 1946 to 1948, Adiseshiah served as Associate General Secretary of the World University Service in Geneva.

This association later helped him to support steps for the construction of the World University Service Centre in Chennai and women’s hostels in Delhi and Rajasthan.

During that period, he was also connected with the World Student Christian Federation and Student Volunteer Service.

He made a referral to Sir Julian Huxley, then Director-General of UNESCO, who invited Adiseshiah to the organization in 1948.

He was posted as Deputy Director of the department of exchange of persons.

In 1976 he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India's third-highest civilian award.

He was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Parliament of India, in 1978.

In 1998, UNESCO created the Malcolm Adiseshiah International Literacy Prize in recognition of his contribution to education and literacy.