BV Parameswara Rao

Parameswara Rao's family came from the village of Dimili in Yellamanchili taluk, Visakhapatnam district. He took an MSc at Andhra University and then worked for six to seven years as a scientific officer at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Bombay, before going to the United States, where he completed a doctorate in nuclear science at Pennsylvania State University in 1967. He turned down the offer of postdoctoral work and returned to India.

Returning to Dimili in 1967, he set out to establish a high school in the village, and did so within about ten months through community contributions. The school was opened during the tenure of Governor Khandubhai Desai and inaugurated by P. V. Narasimha Rao, then education minister of Andhra Pradesh; President V. V. Giri later visited it.

In search of funding for wider development work he approached the German agency EZE, which asked him to constitute a trust. His father provided the initial money on condition that the trust carry the family name, and the Bhagavatula Charitable Trust was registered in November 1976. Working across Dimili and neighbouring villages, the trust ran more than a thousand projects and over a hundred pilot programmes, several of which were replicated elsewhere in India, including village women's thrift and self-help groups that anticipated the DWACRA and self-help group movements, rural banking, wasteland development and the design of literacy primers. Other ventures included the Divvela farmers' cooperative society and a solar salt enterprise.

Parameswara Rao campaigned for rural schooling through padayatras and, in November 1996, an indefinite fast over the shortage of teachers, and worked with the India Literacy Project. He was consulted by the World Bank and by the Government of India, including on the National Literacy Mission and the All India Khadi and Village Industries Board. He argued that India's development depended on the development of its villages and that Indian problems required Indian rather than imported solutions.

He suffered a seizure on 29 May 2019 and died on 9 June 2019 at the age of 86. He was survived by his wife, Kalyani Bhagavatula, two sons and two daughters.[2][3][4][5][6]