Other Activities
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.
He was also a member of the Royal Economic Society.
He was a member of the Governing Body of Centre for Development Studies (CDS) since 1980 and was its Chairman for six years 1986-92. It was under his chairmanship that the Centre entered into an agreement with the United Nations Fund for Population Activities and the Government of India for conducting an international training programme in population and development.
Adisehsiah succeeded Prof. Lakdawala as Chairman of Institute of Social Sciences (ISS) and last presided over the Governing Body meeting on November 11, 1994. It was in the inaugural address to the seminar on Panchayati Raj in Karnataka in October 1985 at ISS that Adiseshiah made the following often quoted comment:
| “ | Tamil Nadu, for instance, has had no panchayat elections for the last 15 years since 1971. In these fifteen years, the Tamil Nadu Government has put forward 20 reasons for the postponement of local elections. It announced election 20 times and postponed it as many times. The reasons given were: drought, flood, cyclone, villagers being busy with agricultural operations, revision of electoral rolls, delay in printing electoral rolls, lowering the age limit, reservations, court stay on reservations, appeals against those reservations in the Supreme Court, school examinations, student unrest, by-elections, mid-term elections, general elections, delimitation of wards, issue of identity cards to voters and Census operations. In addition to these 18 reasons, we have now had four postponements.15 | ” |
Adiseshiah was ceaselessly working for the incorporation of elections to Panchayat institutions in the Constitution. He took the initiative to activate studies on the working of panchayat institutions both in MIDS and CDS.
He was Chairman of the Council for Social Development, Delhi; Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bombay, (Now Mumbai); Tata- McGraw Hill Publishing Company, Bombay (Now Mumbai).
When he was in UNESCO, he played a prime role in 1961 in getting affiliation to the India International Centre (IIC) to that body and to grant recognition to it as one of the three major centres in the world for the appreciation of Eastern and Western structures. In 1976 he became a member of IIC. Soon after he became a member of its Council for Cultural Studies and was elevated to its Executive Committee. In 1978 he was elected a Life Trustee of IIC and Chairman of the Standing Finance Committee. In 1980 he chaired the committee which reviewed its functioning of it from its inception and made recommendations for its future. IIC was his hub when he was in Delhi. Till the end, he played a very major role in all its activities. He edited the proceedings of the seminars there on current economic problems for publication.
He was President of the Tamil Nadu Council for Science and Technology from 1984 till his death.
He was Chairman of the Board of Directors of ‘Reader's Digest’ from 1978 to 1993.
He succeeded G. Ramanujam, the labour leader, as the President of the National Centre for Industrial Harmony, Chennai.
Read more about this topic: Malcolm Adiseshiah
Famous quotes containing the word activities:
“Both at-home and working mothers can overmeet their mothering responsibilities. In order to justify their jobs, working mothers can overnurture, overconnect with, and overschedule their children into activities and classes. Similarly, some at-home mothers,... can make at- home mothering into a bigger deal than it is, over stimulating, overeducating, and overwhelming their children with purposeful attention.”
—Jean Marzollo (20th century)
“Justice begins with the recognition of the necessity of sharing. The oldest law is that which regulates it, and this is still the most important law today and, as such, has remained the basic concern of all movements which have at heart the community of human activities and of human existence in general.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)