Thiruvananthapuram: Left ideologue, writer and nuclear scientist M P Parameswaran passed away on Tuesday. He was 91.

Born on January 18, 1935, in Kiralur, Thrissur, Parameswaran graduated in engineering from the College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram, in 1956. He subsequently joined the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Bombay and earned a PhD in nuclear engineering from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute in 1965.

His scientific career, however, was not confined to atomic research. Between 1969 and 1973, while on deputation from BARC, he served as Assistant Director of the State Institute of Languages in Kerala. During this period, he was also involved in developing a Malayalam keyboard layout for typewriters, a design that later influenced the INSCRIPT keyboard layout used on computers.

In 1975, Parameswaran resigned from his scientific career and devoted himself full-time to Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad (KSSP). The decision marked a turning point not only in his life but also in Kerala's science movement.

Under his leadership and with his organisational efforts, KSSP grew from a forum of science teachers and communicators into a broad-based people's movement. Its central idea was simple but radical: science should not remain the preserve of experts, but should become part of public life and social change.

Parameswaran subsequently helped take this approach beyond Kerala. He played a key role in conceptualising and organising the Bharat Jan Vigyan Jatha in 1987, a nationwide science communication campaign. He was also instrumental in building the All India People's Science Network, bringing together people's science organisations from across the country.

In 1990, he was again at the centre of a nationwide campaign, the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Jatha, organised as part of the National Literacy Mission. The campaign helped lay the groundwork for the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti and contributed to a large-scale literacy movement across India.

For Parameswaran, writing was another way of making science accessible. He authored dozens of books in Malayalam and English and wrote extensively for periodicals. His subjects ranged from nuclear science, radioactivity and astronomy to mathematics, ecology and social sciences. His writing sought to make complex ideas understandable to ordinary readers while connecting scientific thinking with questions of society and development.

His contribution was recognised with several awards, including honours for books aimed at neo-literates and basic and cultural literature, as well as an award for children's literature. He was also among the recipients of the Kerala government's Kerala Sree award in 2022.

Parameswaran's intellectual journey also took him into politics and questions of social organisation. He was associated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) for more than three decades before being expelled following differences over his book Fourth World. The work argued for a model centred on decentralised democracy and an economic system less driven by consumerism.

Parameswaran also made a brief appearance on the big screen. In the 2007 Malayalam film AKG, based on the life of communist leader A K Gopalan, he played another towering figure from Kerala's political history, former Chief Minister E M S Namboodiripad.