Major Deaths in India 2022-2023

Jamshed J Irani

Jamshed J Irani, the “Steel Man of India” who “reinvented” Tata Steel and made it the “lowest-cost steel producer in the world” competing in the international market, died in Jamshedpur on October 31, 2022 age 86. Iran, conferred with the Padma Bhushan in 2007 for his contribution to the industry, retired from the board of Tata Steel in June 2011, leaving behind a legacy of 43 years.

Elaben Bhatt

Elaben Bhatt, noted Gandhian, leading women’s empowerment activist, and renowned founder of the self-Empolyed Women’s Association (SEWA) died on November 2, 2022, aged 89. Founded by her in 1972, SEWA is one of the largest cooperatives working for women, with a base of over two million members from around 18 States in the county and neighbouring nations. She is the recipient of several national and international awards, including the Padma Bhushan the Ramon Magsaysay Award and the Indira Gandhi Peace Prize. She was also a Member of the Rajya Sabha and the Planning Commission of India in the 1980s. In 2007, she became part of a group of world leaders called the Elders, founded by Nelson Mandela to promote human rights and peace across the world.

Shyam Saran Negi

Shyam Saran Negi India’s oldest voter, died on November 5, 2022, aged 106. Popularly known as Master Sayam, he became the first voter of Indian democracy as the general polls of the country were conducted in January and February 1952. Keeping in mind snow and weather conditions, the polls were conducted in October 1951 in Himachal Pradesh. Negi cast his first vote on October 23, 1951, in the Kalpa polling station, becoming the first voter in the country, and he cast his vote for the 34^th time on November 2, 2022, which became his last.

Kirshan Ghattamaneni

Krishan Ghattamaneni fondly referred to as superstar Krishna by legions of Telugu cinema viewers and hailed for his iconic portrayal of Alluri Seetharama Raju, died on November 15, 2022, aged 79. In addition to his career as an actor, director and 350 films, Krishna is known as the father of current star Mahesh Babu. He is the last among the five legends who ruled Telugu cinema from the 1960s to the 80s with the others being N.T. Rama Rao, Akkineni Nageswara Rao, Shobhan Babu and Krishnam Raju. Krishna was conferred with Padma Bhushan in 2009.

Areez Pirojshaw Khamabatta

Areez Pirojshaw Khamabatta, the founding chairman of the popular drink Rasan, died on November 19 aged 85. He created affordable soft drink packs of Rasna in the 1970s as an alternative to soft drink products sold at high costs. It is sold at 1.8 million retail outlets in the country. His father Phiroja Khambatta started a modest business which Areez took to become the largest concentrate manufacturer in the world, with a presence in over 60 countries.

Yoginder K Alagh

Yoginder K Alagh renowned economist, academic and former Union minister, died on December 6 aged 83. From 1996-98, Alagh served as the minister of power, planning, and programme implementation. He was also a member of the Planning Commission. Alagh headed a task force in 1979 that devised the first-ever poverty estimates based on calorie requirements. He was the chairman of the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA) from 2006 to 2012.

Manohar Devadoss

Manohar Devadoss, the Padma Shri award-winning artist and writer, died on December 7, 2022, aged 85. The book Green Well Years is about his childhood in Madurai. A Poem to Courage; Dreams, Seasons and Promises; and Mahe and Mano: Challenges, Resilience and Triumphs are works about his life with his wife, Mahema. His intricate ink drawings of buildings and scenes in Chennai and Madurai are very famous.

Bhairon Singh Rathore

Bhairon Singh Rathore a BSF veteran of the 1971 India-Pakistan war whose bravery at Rajasthan’s Longewala post was portrayed by actor Suniel Shetty in the Bollywood movie Border, died on December 19, 2022, aged   81. In recognition of his bravery. Rathore was awarded the Sena Medal in 1972.

RK Krishnakuamr

RK Krishnakumar, Tata Group veteran and former Tata Sons director died on January 1, 2023, aged 84. Known to be a significant contributor in several acquisitions of the Tata Group, Krishnakumar helped facilitate the  271 million buy-out of Tetley in 2000, thereby making Tata Global Beverages the second-largest tea company in the world. Krishnakumar was awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award by the Indian government in 2009, for his contributions to Indian Trade and insustry.

Sumitra Sen

Sumitra Sen, the eminent Rabindra San-geet exponent, died on January 3, 2023, aged 89. Her memorable songs that regaled Rabindra San-geet lovers for over four decades include Megh Bolechhe Jobo Jobo, Tomari Jharnatalar Nirjone, Sakhi Bhabna Kahare Bike and Achhe Dukho Achhe Mrityu. The West Bengal government had awarded her ‘Sangeet Mahasamman’ in 2012.

Dr Tehemton

Dr Tehemton E Udwadia, best Known as the father of laparoscopic surgery in India, died on January 7, 2023, aged 88. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the country’s third-highest civilian award, in 2017.

Rehman Rahi     

Rehman Rahi renowned poet and Kashmir’s first Jnapith awardee, died on January 9, 2023, aged 98. He received the highest literary honour in the country Jnanpith Award in 2007 for his collection Siyah Rood Jaeren Manz (In Black Drizzle). Rahi received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1961 for his poetry collection Nawroz-i-Saba and got the Padma Shri in 2000.

Sara Aboobacker

Sara Aboobacker, renowned Kannada novelist, essayist, and translator died on January 10 aged 86. She highlighted the plight and predicament of marginalized Muslim women in the border district of Kasaragod through her novels and short stories. Her noted works include Chandragiriya Theeradalli and Hottu Kanthuva Munna.

Sharad Yadav

Sharad Yadav, former Union Minister and one of the country’s most prominent socialist leaders, died on January 12 aged 75. He served as a minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in the late’ 90s and the VP Singh government in 1989. A three-time member of Rajya Sabha, he was elected to the Lok Sabha seven times. The founder-member of Bihar’s ruling Janata Dal United, he quit after Chief Minister Nitish Kumar ended the Grand Alliance and joined hands with the BJP. In 2018, he launched his own party, the Loktantrik Janata Dal, but merged it with Lalu Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal two years later.

Shanti Bhushan

Shanti Bhushan, former Union Law Minister and senior advocate, died on January 31 aged 97. He was a Law Minister in the Morarji Desai Cabinet between 1977 and 1979. As a senior advocate he fought alongside his son and noted civil rights lawyer, Prashant Bhushan, for judicial accountability and transparency. His memoir is tiled Courting Destiny.

Vice Admiral PJ Jacob

Vice Admiral PJ Jacob, former Vice Chief of the Naval Staff, died on January 22 aged 82. He assumed office as the vice chief of the naval staff on March 31, 1998, and served in the position until February 28, 2001. He was a recipient of the Param Vishist Seva Medal, Ati Vishist Seva Medal and the Vishist Seva Medal. He had also been the Director General of the Indian Coast Guard.

Balkrishna Doshi

Balkrishna Doshi one of the Indian Subcontinent’s most celebrated architects, died on January 24 aged 95. With a portfolio of over 100 built projects, his career is widely praised for the influence that it has had on the direction of Indian architecture. Many of his projects were created as part of his own studio, Vastu Shilpa Consultants, which he founded in 1955. Doshi was the first architect from India to be awarded the Pritzker Prize. He was also awarded, the Royal Instiute of British Architects’ Royal Gold Medal in 2022. Earlier, he was also honoured with Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri by the government of India.

Vani Jayaram

Vani Jayaram is an iconic playback singer who has sung over 10,000 songs in 19 languages, including Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Telugu and Kannada, died on February 4 aged 77. In her long and illustrious career of over 50 years, she has rendered a mine of memorable songs including the ‘Bole re Papi Hara’ from Hindi flick Guddi (1971), ‘Yezhu Swarangalukkul’ from Tamil film Apoorva Ragangal (1975) and ‘Malligai En Mannan Mayangum’ (1974 Tamil movie Deerga Sumangali). She was a recipient of the Padma Bhushan Award.

Nandamuri Taraka Ratna

Nandamuri Taraka Ratna, Telugu actor and politician, died on February 18 aged 39. Ratna was the grandson of NT Rama Rao, a veteran actor and the former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh. Ratna is remembered for roles in films like okato Number Kurraadu, Yuva Rathna and Amaravathi: Later on, he took a political direction, joining the Telugu Desam Party.

Dr. Kanak Rele

Dr Kanak Rele, a prime revolutionary in Mohiniyattam dance, guru, and choreographer whose name became synonymous with the Sopanam style of the lyrical dance form of Kerala, died on February 22 aged 85. In 1973, Dr. Rele established the Nalanda Nritya Kala Mahavidyalaya offering undergraduate, post-graduate and Ph.D degrees affiliated with Bombay University. Dr. Rele created another record for herself by earning her Ph.D in dance, the first in India, in 1977. Her doctoral thesis was titled, ‘Mohini Attam: All Aspects and Spheres of Influence’ Dr. Rele was conferred the Padma Bhushan in 2013.

Innocent

Innocent, veteran Malayalam actor and former Lok Sabha MP, died on March 26 aged 75. In 2012, he was diagnosed with cancer. After battling the disease for three years, Innocent had in 2015 announced that he was finally free from it. In a career spanning more than five decades, he was seen in more than 750 movies. The last film which featured him was Kaduva, released in 2022.

Vivan Sundaram

Vivan Sundaram, an artist and activist widely credited with spearheading a transition in modern and contemporary Indian art from European-inspired abstract painting to multimedia forms addressing social and political realities in the country, died on March 29 aged 79. Among the installations that are considered game-changers by Sundaram are 1993’s Memorial, a piece made in response to the destruction of the Babir Mosque and 2005’s 12 Bed Ward featuring 12 bed frames lined with the soles of shoes instead of mattresses. His 2022 series titled “Six Stations of a Life Pursued” is composed of semiabstract images of caged figures and close-ups of sutured flesh.

Jalabala Vaidya

Jalabala Vaidya, legendary theatre actor and co-founder of Delhi’s iconic Akshara Theatre, died on April 9 aged 86. She produced, performed in and narrated most of the Akshara Theatre’s television films, such as India Alive, The Kashmir Story, and The Sufi Way. She also authored five books; Be, This Is Full, That Is Full, Life Is But A Dream and The Akshara Acting Method.

Moorkoth Vengakandi Shankaran

Moorkoth Vengakandi Shankaran (M.V. Sankaran also Known as Gemini Shankaran), the founder of Gemini Circus and a pioneer of Indian circus, died on April 23 aged 99. Sankaran, who was born in 1924, trained under noted circus artist Keeleri Kunhikannan for three years and later joined the military and retired after the Second World War. After working with various circus groups across the country, he purchased Vijaya Circus Company in 1951 and renamed it Gemini Circus. Later, he started his second company, Jumbo Circus. He was honoured by the Union government with a lifetime achievement award considering his overall contribution to the circus in the country.

Parkash Singh Badal

Parkash Singh Badal, a five-time former chief minister of Punjab and Akali Dal patriarch, died on April 25 aged 95. He was the youngest Chief Minister to ever hold office in the state of Punjab at the age of 43. He was the state’s longest-serving chief minister, at 17 years across five terms. He was president of Akali  Dal from 1995 till 2017 when he handed over the mantle to his son and heir apparent Sukhbir Singh Badal. In a career spanning over seven decades, he lost only two elections-one in 1967, and the latest in the 2022 Punjab assembly election.

Ranjit Guha

Ranjit Guha, a pioneering figure in Subaltern Studies, the movement to mainstream the history of marginalized farmer and their suppressed voice in the Indian subcontinent, died on April 28 aged 99. He, alongside his collaborators (many of whom were his students), began the Subaltern School which remains one of the most influential post-colonial post-Marxist schools in history. His notable books are A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963); Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983) and Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (1997).

Padma Desai

Padma Desai, Indian-American development economist and professor of comparative economic systems at Columbia University, died on April 29 aged 91. Known for her scholarship on Soviet and Indian industrial policy, she was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2009. Breaking Out: An Indian Woman’s American Journey and Conversations on Russia: Reform from Yeltsin to Putin are two of Desai’s fifteen books and monographs. Her Financial Crisis, contagion, and Containment: From Asia to Argentina was described by Paul Krugaman as the “best book yet on financial crises.”

Srichand Parmanand Hinduja

Srichand Parmanand Hinduja, the eldest of the four Hinduja brothers and chairman of the Hinduja Group, died on May 17 aged 87. The Hinduja Group, which employs 200,000 people across more than 30 countires, was founded in 1914 by Parmanand Deepchand Hinduja, who traded in carpets and dried fruit from Iran before his sons Srichand and Gopichand shifted their base to the UK in the 1970s. The groups’ listed ventures in India include Ashok Leyland, Induslnd Bank, Gulf Oil Lubricants India, Hinduja GlobalSolutions, NDL Ventures and GOCL Corporation.

Sarath Babu

Sarath Babu, who played lead and supporting roles in over 200 films spanning many languages and genres died on May 22 aged 71.

Sir lvan Menezes

Sir lvan Menezes, the long-serving boss of the world’s big-gest spirits maker Diageo, died on June 7 aged 63. Menezes was until early June chief executive of Diageo, the drinks giant that owns popular brands such as Johnnie Walker whisky, Smirnoff vodka and Guinness. Menezes was knighted for his services to business and equality in King Charles’s first new year honours list in January 2023.

Oommen Chandy

Oommen Chandy, a two-time Chief Minister of Kerala, died on July 18 aged 79. He first served as the CM from 2004 to 2006 and his other term was from 2011 to 2016. He represented the Puthuppally Assembly constituency as a member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) in the State Assembly from 1970 until his death, making him the longest-serving member of the Kerala Legislative Assembly.

CR Rao

Calyampudi Radhakrishnan Rao who was one of the world’s most eminent statisticains and spent nearly all of his professional career in India, died on August 22 in the United States aged 102. Having taught and researched at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata, Dr. Rao pioneered several fundamental statistical concepts such as the Cramer Rao inequality and Rao-Back-Wellization, concepts that appear in undergraduate textbooks on statistics and econometrics.

Jayanta Mahapatra

Jayanta Mahapatra, the eminent poet and litterateur, died on August 27 aged 95. Jayanta Mahapatra was the first Indian poet to win the Sahitya Akademi Award for English poetry. He was also conferred with the Padma Shri (India’s fourth highest civilian honour) in 2009. However, he returned it in 2015 to protest against “rising intolerance in India” He is best known for authoring poems such as “Indian Summer” and “ Hunger” regarded as classics in modern Indian English literature. His other prominent works also include Relationship, Bare Face, and Shadow Space. In all, Mahaptra penned 27 books of poems, of which seven are in India and the rest in English.

Ajit Ninan

Ajit Ninan, veteran cartoonist renowned for his series ‘Centrestage’ in india Today and ‘Ninam’s World’ in Times of India, died on September 8 aged 68.

Gita Mehta

Gita Mehta, whose books examined the impact of Western culture on modern India and vice versa, bringing an Indian and a woman’s perspective to a subject matter that was long the province of white men, died on September 16 aged 80. She has penned books including Karma Cola, Snake and Ladders, A River Sutra, Raj and The Eternal Ganesha.

K G George

K G George, an eminent film director Known for his standout Malayalam movies of the 1980s that took the middle path between art and commercial cinema and inspired a future generation of filmmakers, died on September 24 aged 77. George’s notable films include the noir psychological thriller Irakal (Vitims, 1958), Yavanika (The Curtain), the political satire Panchavadi Palam, and Adaminte Variyellu (Adam’s Rib, 1983) which told the story of three women seeking to escape patriarchal oppression. In 2016, he was awarded the JC Daniel Award, in recognition of his lifelong contributions to Malayalam cinema.

MS Swaminathan

Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan (MS Swaminathan), legendary agricultural scientist and father of India’s ‘Green Revolution, died on September 28, 2023, aged 98. Swaminathan started his career in 1949 researching the genetics of potato wheat, rice and jute. When India was on the verge of a mass famine leading to scarcity of food grains, Swaminathan along with Norman Borlaug and other scientists developed the high-yield variety seeds of wheat. Swaminathan worked with agriculture ministers including C Subramaniam and Jagjivan Ram during the 1960s and 70s for the success of the ‘Green Revolution, ‘ an initiative that paved the way for the exponential rise in productivity of wheat and rice. He was awarded the first World Food Prize in 1987 following which he set up the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai. He was also awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1971 and the Albert Einstein World Science Award in 1986. He had also been conferred with the Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan and the Padma Vibhushan.