M P Parameswaran, a nuclear scientist turned people’s educator, transformed Kerala’s understanding of science and development.
Leaving BARC in 1975, he took complex ideas to ordinary citizens through KSSP, helped shape landmark environmental struggles like Silent Valley and Athirappilly, and insisted that technology and development be questioned democratically by those who live with their consequences.
M P Parameswaran, the nuclear scientist who walked away from India’s atomic establishment to spend the rest of his life taking science to ordinary people, died at his home in Thrissur in Kerala on August 11. He was 91 and had been suffering from age-related ailments.
With him goes one of Kerala’s most restless minds, a man who spent nearly seven decades asking questions that governments, political parties and even his own ideological comrades were often uncomfortable answering.
For Kerala, his death is more than the passing of a scientist, writer or environmental activist. It is the end of a remarkable intellectual journey that began inside the world of nuclear technology and eventually took him to villages, schools, forests, rivers and people’s movements.
He moved from the laboratory to the grassroots, from nuclear science to environmentalism, from orthodox Marxism to a search for a more democratic and decentralised social order. In the process, he helped change the way an entire society understood science, development and its own power to question authority.
Born in Kiralur in Thrissur district, then in the princely state of Cochin, on January 18, 1935, Parameswaran graduated in engineering from the College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram, in 1956. He went to the Soviet Union and obtained a doctorate in nuclear engineering from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute before joining the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Trombay.
He became part of the scientific establishment that was building the foundations of India’s nuclear programme, but the laboratory was not to be his final destination.
In 1975, he left BARC and chose a completely different life. He immersed himself in the Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad, or KSSP, which was transforming itself from a forum of science writers into a mass people’s science movement.
Parameswaran understood something that would define the rest of his life: science could not remain the property of laboratories, universities and governments. It had to become a language ordinary people could understand and use.
He wrote extensively in Malayalam because he believed knowledge became democratic only when it could be understood by people in their own language. Nuclear science, astronomy, mathematics, ecology, economics, social science and technology entered the pages of books and pamphlets that travelled far beyond the educated middle class.
He wrote for children, workers, teachers and new literates, making difficult subjects accessible without stripping them of their complexity.
That was his quiet revolution. He helped turn KSSP into one of India’s most remarkable people’s movements, where science became a method of questioning power.
Villagers could ask why a project was necessary. Students could challenge official claims. Citizens could examine the economic and ecological consequences of development. Knowledge no longer had to flow only from the government to the people. It could travel in the opposite direction too.
That transformation became particularly visible during the struggle to save Silent Valley. The proposed hydroelectric project in the pristine evergreen forests of Palakkad had powerful supporters. Kerala desperately needed electricity and the project was presented as a symbol of development. But Silent Valley was not merely another piece of forest. It was one of the last great remnants of tropical evergreen rainforest in the Western Ghats, carrying extraordinary biological wealth.
Parameswaran, along with environmentalist M K Prasad and others, brought scientific and economic scrutiny into the debate. The question was not simply whether one should love forests. It was whether destroying an irreplaceable ecological system was a rational way of producing electricity.
The campaign that followed became a watershed in India’s environmental history. Scientists, teachers, writers, students and ordinary citizens came together, and a government project was subjected to a level of public scrutiny that was unusual for the time. Eventually, the hydroelectric project was abandoned and Silent Valley survived.
But Parameswaran’s contribution to Silent Valley cannot be measured merely by the survival of one forest. He helped create an intellectual climate in which Kerala learnt to ask a fundamental question: development for whom? That question would travel into almost every major environmental struggle that followed.
For those who encountered Parameswaran outside formal political or scientific institutions, there was another side to him. He could be demanding, intense and intellectually uncompromising, but he also had the ability to make people feel that their questions mattered. For a generation of young environmentalists, his importance lay not simply in what he wrote or the organisations he helped build, but in the confidence he gave ordinary people to enter conversations from which they had traditionally been excluded.
Anitha Santhi, Thiruvananthapuram-based environmentalist and coordinator of Tree Walk, recalls that Parameswaran was humility personified but possessed a will and a determination to remain steadfast in his positions and convictions.
That memory is important because Parameswaran’s influence was never confined to the formal institutions with which he was associated. His greatest legacy was the confidence he created in people who did not necessarily possess scientific qualifications, but who were willing to learn, ask questions and stand up for the places they lived in.
Environmental activist S Usha remembers another dimension of that influence, particularly the way Parameswaran connected science with everyday life and environmental responsibility.
“His connection to the masses was immense. Ordinary people turned to be champions of the causes he espoused,” recalls Usha.
These memories matter because Parameswaran’s public life can easily be reduced to a list of organisations, books, campaigns and ideological battles. Those who met him in the field remember something more human: an elderly intellectual who continued to believe that knowledge had meaning only when it reached people and helped them make choices about their own lives.
That question travelled into the battle over Athirappilly. The proposed hydroelectric project on the Chalakudy river brought into sharp focus the conflict between electricity generation and the protection of one of Kerala’s most ecologically significant riverine landscapes. Once again, the argument was not simply about trees and waterfalls. It was about the value of rivers, forests, biodiversity and the livelihoods and cultures that depend on them.
For Parameswaran, environmentalism was never an isolated concern. Ecology was inseparable from economics, politics and social justice. He understood that a forest could not be defended permanently without asking why people were dependent on its resources, who controlled land and technology, who benefited from large projects and who bore their costs.
That made his opposition to nuclear power particularly significant.
Parameswaran was not an outsider attacking nuclear technology from ignorance. He had been trained in nuclear engineering and had worked inside India’s atomic establishment. Yet over the years he became increasingly critical of nuclear power, questioning its safety, the enormous costs involved, the risks to communities and the inadequacy of disaster preparedness.
During the agitation against the Kudankulam nuclear power project in neighbouring Tamil Nadu, he supported the concerns of local communities. The man who had once been trained to harness the atom had become one of the country’s most prominent critics of the nuclear path. It was not a rejection of science. It was, in his understanding, a deeper belief in science and in the right of citizens to question the consequences of technological choices.
Parameswaran believed that scientific knowledge should make society more democratic, not less. Technology should serve human beings rather than turn human beings into subjects of technological systems. A project could not be justified simply because it was technically possible. The people living with its consequences had to be part of the decision.
For environmentalists in Wayanad, Parameswaran belonged to a larger tradition of ecological thinking that treated the Western Ghats not as a collection of resources but as a living system. N Badusha, president of the Wayanad Prakrithi Samrakshana Samithy and a veteran grassroots conservationist, has spent decades fighting forest destruction, illegal quarrying, encroachment and projects that threaten Wayanad’s fragile ecology. His own activism reflects the kind of grassroots environmental politics that Parameswaran helped strengthen across Kerala.
For Badusha and others working at the grassroots, the importance of Parameswaran lay in making environmental protection a people’s issue rather than the preserve of specialists. The lesson was that forests, rivers and mountains were not merely subjects for scientific papers. They were part of people’s lives, livelihoods and futures.
Parameswaran’s contribution also extended beyond environmental movements. He played an important role in literacy campaigns, science education, appropriate technology, decentralised development and the creation of a wider people’s science network across India. He helped establish the idea that literacy was not merely learning to read and write. It was learning to understand the world and acquire the confidence to change it.
That idea captures his entire life. Parameswaran wanted people to understand science, society, power and nature, and then question what they were being told. He believed that the ordinary citizen could engage with questions that governments and experts often treated as their exclusive preserve. His writing, activism and public work were all attempts to break that monopoly over knowledge.
In his later years, the body gradually failed him. He moved around in a wheelchair and his physical world became smaller, but his intellectual restlessness remained intact. Even in his nineties, he continued to speak about science as a way of understanding nature rather than merely producing technology and gadgets. He urged younger people to reach out to ordinary citizens and, above all, to inspire them to dream.
It was an extraordinary thing for a man who had spent a lifetime questioning grand promises to still insist on the importance of dreams.
M P Parameswaran did not teach Kerala to oppose development. He taught Kerala to question the definition of development. He did not teach people to distrust science. He taught them to demand that science remain accountable to society.