Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: How old is Malcolm Sathiyanathan Adiseshiah?
His life came to a quick end. He was hospitalized for less than a week with kidney and heart ailments. He was conscious till the last day. He died on 21 November 1994, aged 84 years.
From 1946-1948 Adiseshiah served as Associate General Secretary of the World University Service in Geneva. This association helped him later to support steps for the construction of 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.
Malcolm S. Adiseshiah Chair of Development Economics and Decentralised Planning is instituted by MEAT in the Institute for Social Sciences, New Delhi.
Voorhees College, Vellore has instituted annual awards of Dr. Malcolm S. Adiseshiah Prize for Proficiency in History to the best III year student of the B.A.(History) Class; Dr. Malcolm S. Adiseshiah Prize for Proficiency in Chemistry to the best III Year Student of the B.Sc., (Chemistry) Class and The Adiseshiah Memorial Gold Medal for Proficiency in English to the best student of the III Year B.A./B.Sc., class. It is not clear whether the last mentioned prize is awarded in his honour or in honour of his illustrious father who was principal of that college.
A ‘Founder’s Day Lecture’ by a distinguished social scientist is arranged annually in MIDS, Chennai. To commemorate Professor Adiseshiah's cosmopolitanism, a Visiting Professorial Chair has been instituted there whereby a scholar of distinction is invited to that position. The Malcolm and Elizabeth Adiseshiah Ph.D. Merit Scholarship is created there to provide training and facilities for talented researchers to pursue high-quality academic research dedicated to development issues in Tamil Nadu. An award for the best teacher in economics in Tamil Nadu and prizes to winners of an essay-writing competition held for PG students of Chennai colleges are given annually at MIDS.
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. In the college he worked on planning a rural service programme in cooperation with the Visva-Bharati University associates at Sriniketan and Santiniketan.
In later life, after his retirement from UNESCO, Adiseshiah recalled his training and research;
Adiseshiah married Helen Paranjothi, with whom he had a son and a daughter. 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 who he met at the Madras Women’s Christian College.
He was president of the Viswayuvak Kendra. He was a member of the UGC Standing Committee on Adult Education. When the country launched the National Literacy Mission on 5 November 1988, Adiseshiah was the natural choice for its leadership. The Mission searched for an alternative agency and a strategy to create a country wide churning for literacy and created the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samithi (BGVS) in August 1989 and invited Adiseshiah to be its President. BGVS facilitated the shift of the adult education from a government controlled, government sponsored programme to acquire a status of a mass movement. Adiseshiah had the satisfaction of witnessing the declaration of Ernakulam district in Kerala as having achieved the status of total literacy on 4 February 1990. The new premises of the State Resources Centre of the Tamil Nadu Board of Continuing Education was named after him and was declared open on his 83rd birthday on 18 April 1992.
In March 1950 Adiseshiah was promoted to the post of Director of technical assistance department, he was one of its six top executives. Adiseshiah was authorized to represent the Director-General at the technical assistance board set up by the UN.
“In his humanistic approach to the role of education, science and culture in the development process, Dr. Malcolm Adiseshiah has reviewed the past in order to seek improvement in the future. The philosophy of development set forth in this volume is a bright beacon which should help guide UNESCO successfully into the Second Development Decade.13”
Late V. R. Nedunchezhiyan, who was for long a cabinet minister in the DMK and AIADMK ministries in Tamil Nadu, recalled in the memorial meeting held in the Centenary Hall of the Madras University in December 1995 that Adiseshiah refused to accept the offer of a Governorship of a state in 1977. He said that a central cabinet minister asked Adiseshiah’s consent for appointment as Governor of Goa. Adiseshiah immediately refused the offer stating that he was not willing to accept any task which would cause his long separation from his beloved MIDS. The central Cabinet minister, after consulting with the then Prime Minister of India, offered Adiseshiah the Governorship of Tamil Nadu, knowing full well that it was against the prevailing convention that no person born in any state would be appointed Governor of that state.
In September 1970 Adiseshiah and his wife Elizabeth registered in Paris a trust fund for starting Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS hereafter). MIDS was conceived to undertake studies and research on developmental issues on the economy, polity and society with special reference to Tamil Nadu state. MIDS started functioning from January 1971 in one of their properties in Gandhinagar, Adyar, a Chennai suburb. Adiseshiah was its first Director. Adiseshiah started publishing the publishing of ‘Bulletin– Madras Development Seminar Series’ in February 1971, and wrote its editorials every month from Feb. 1971 covering international, national and Tamil Nadu issues, until his death. ‘This surely’ wrote, Prof.S. Subramanian, in the prolegomena of the special issue of the Bulletin bought out after his demise, ‘is the stuff of which archives are made’10
UNESCO's tentative proposals were submitted for Technical Assistance for Economic Development in 1950-51. Adiseshiah organized the new department, established area desks corresponding to UN geographical regions, instituted the procedures and methods of operation and set up a ‘report and information unit’ which produced periodically a technical assistance bulletin.
“Radical changes which had affected educational demand and supply are forcing a reconsideration of the very foundations of educational planning such as they prevailed in their heyday some 30 years ago, when Dr. Adiseshiah played a historical role, guiding UNESCO in setting regional targets for public spending on education throughout the world and in establishing UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning.7”
Adiseshiah visited the hundred and twenty seven member states of the UN several times. He visited each one of the Third World countries that was becoming member of the UNESCO, studied its economic situation first hand, assessed its need for literacy and education and made recommendations as to how those needs could be met in the ‘Mission Reports.’ Each of the ‘Mission Reports’ were reported to be pioneering contributions about the specific regions on which the reports focused to the emerging discipline of development economics.
Adiseshiah was born on 18 April 1910 in Vellore, southern India. He is the second of the five children of Paul Varanasi Adiseshiah and Grace Nesamma Adiseshiah. His father was professor of philosophy[3] 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.[3] 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.
The Malcolm Adiseshiah Award carries a cash grant of 200,000 Rupees and a citation and is given every year to a mid career scholar who has made outstanding contributions to the field of Development Studies. It is instituted by MEAT and presented in a special ceremony at Chennai.
Adiseshiah is remembered by a few significant awards, prizes scholarships and endowed chairs. The annual Malcolm Adiseshiah International Literacy Prize, (value US $15,000) is awarded by UNESCO from 1998. The prize rewards organizations or individuals displaying outstanding merit and achieving particularly effective results in contributing to the fight for literacy in among the member countries of UNESCO.
MIDS was established by Malcolm Adiseshiah and his wife Elizabeth Adiseshiah in January 1971. Malcolm Adiseshiah served as its first Director. In March 1977, MIDS was reconstituted as a National Research Institute under the sponsorship of Government of India through the Indian Council of Social Science Research and the Government of Tamil Nadu. The Adiseshiah's donated the land, buildings, furniture, equipment and made cash endowments to the newly constituted institute. Malcolm Adiseshiah resigned as MIDS' Director in 1978 and became the Chairman and Honorary fellow. Professor C.T. Kurien became the next Director of MIDS. In 1985, the Reserve Bank of India established a Chair for applied research in regional economics, which has since been converted to a fully autonomous unit in 2002.
Malcolm Sathiyanathan Adiseshiah (18 April 1910– 21 November 1994),[1] was an Indian development economist and educator. In 1976 he was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the Government of India, a civilian award given for "distinguished service of a high order...without distinction of race, occupation, position or sex."[2] In 1998 the UNESCO created ‘The Malcolm Adiseshiah International Literacy Prize’ in recognition of his contribution to education and literacy.
In 1993 and 1994, UNESCO PROSPECTS: Quarterly review of comparative education published a series of profiles of 100 famous educators from around of the world. In the company of illustrious intellectuals like Aristotle, Confucius, Freud, Gramsci, Locke, Plato, and Rousseu, the list includes seven Indians. They are: Malcolm Adiseshiah; Sri Aurobindo; Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi; Jiddu Krishnamurti; J.P. Naik; Rabindranath Tagore and Vivekananda. These articles have subsequently been collected and published under the title “Thinkers on Education” in three volumes, edited by Tedesco, Juan Carlos and Morsy, Zaghloul, [Paris, UNESCO; New Delhi, Oxford & IBH Publishing, 1997].
Adiseshiah was President of Indian Economic Association in 1973-74 and presided over the Waltair session of its Annual Conference of in 1974. Subsequently, as a past President he evinced keen interest in putting the association’s finances in sound order. He took steps to advance its publishing record.
Elizabeth Adiseshiah died in 1986 leaving all her property to her husband. In Dr. Adiseshiah’s will, he had bequeathed his valuable residential property to MIDS, and his remaining wealth for setting up of Malcolm and Elizabeth Adiseshiah Trust (MEAT) for conducting programmes in the broad area of economics– teaching and research, both fundamental and applied.
The (), New Delhi in partnership with the , New Delhi and support of the Malcolm and Elizabeth Adiseshiah Trust has organised the Malcolm Adiseshiah Mid-Year Review of the Indian Economy since 2011. prepares the annual review, and the proceedings are jointly published.[4][5][6][7]