Saturday, December 4, 2021

Birth Anniversary of Ramaswamy Venkatraman

All the children of Apna Skool Paid tribute to Ramaswamy Venkataraman (R.Venkataraman) on his 111th birth anniversary and told about the work done by Ramaswamy Venkataraman or RV, as he was fondly known (1910-2009) was an Indian lawyer, Indian independence activist, and politician who served as a Union Minister and as the eighth president of India. RV has had an abiding love for the Nilgiris and was keenly interested in its development and welfare. RV had a long connection with the Nilgiris. It was RV who organized the plantation workers in the Nilgiris on trade union lines way back in 1948. It was, again, RV who, as the Industries Minister of the then Madras State, conceived the idea of bringing the small tea growers of Nilgiris within the ambit of the co-operative sector in the sixties. Thanks to his foresight and initiative, Nilgiris today can boast of being the only tea-growing area in the country where small growers co-exist, in equal strength, with the plantations. He also played a notable role in the Kundah Hydroelectric project and Hindustan Photo Films in the Nilgiris.