Fifty years after he left this world for his rendezvous with the Maker, CP Ramaswamy Aiyar, a legal luminary and statesman who thought and walked ahead of his times was described as a visionary by Justice TS Thakur, Chief Justice of India. “The 82-km-long concrete road between Trivandrum and Kanyakumari built in 18 months during the tenure of CP Ramaswamy Aiyar as the dewan of Travancore in 1932 is the precursor to the concept of smart cities which we are seeing today. It was CP who got the Trivandrum airport ready in record time so that the Air India’s Bombay-Trivandrum flight could land in Kerala’s capital in 1935 itself,” the Chief Justice reminded the audience paying rich tributes to the lawyer-turned-statesman-turned visionary.
Justice Thakur said that great deeds and works done by people like CP who worked for setting up harmonious social life in the country and justice for all were yet to reach everywhere in India. “He had been an extra ordinary public servant who was the first person in India to make school education free and compulsory in Travancore in 1931 itself. India could formulate a policy for free and compulsory education only be 2009,” pointed out Justice Thakur while delivering the keynote address in the meeting held at Chennai on Saturday to mark the 50th anniversary of the CP Ramaswamy Aiyar Foundation which is doing yeomen service in the fields of environment, education of the underprivileged and special children and preservation of ecology and environment through sustained manner.
The Chief Justice also said that had the political leadership taken notice of CP’s proposal to construct aerodromes/airports in all major cities and towns in the country, India would have become the largest civil aviation market in the world.
The chief justice pointed out that the three major concerns facing the country are the terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir, terrorism in North East India and the Maoist insurgency. “The focus should be to eliminate the terrorism and the extremism and to inculcate in the younger generation the teachings based on Indian cultural ethos and ideologies so that we get millions of young CPs to take the country and the world to newer heights,” he said.
Nanditha Krishna, great grand daughter of CP Ramaswamy Aiyar who is also the honourary director of the CPR Foundation, said that though the British Government had knighted CP in 1941, he gave it up when the British Government arrested Mahatma Gandhi in 1942.