Nambi Narayanan

Early and personal life Nambi Narayanan was born on 12 December 1941 in Nagercoil, in the erstwhile Princely state of Travancore (present-day Kanyakumari District). He completed his schooling at Higher Secondary School, Nagercoil. He received a Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering from Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai. Narayanan lost his father while pursuing his degree in Madurai, with his mother falling sick soon after. He had two sisters. Nambi married Meena Narayanan and has two children. Their son, Shankar Narayanan, is a businessman. Their daughter, Geetha Arunan, is a Montessori school teacher in Bangalore and is married to Subbiah Arunan, an ISRO scientist, who was the director of the Mars Orbiter Mission and a Padma Shri awardee.

Career

After studying mechanical engineering in Madurai, Narayanan started his career in 1966 at ISRO as a technical assistant at the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station. He has claimed that he had to educate Sarabhai on liquid propulsion technology in his book.

Narayanan spent 50 days in jail. He claims that officials from the Intelligence Bureau, who initially interrogated him, wanted him to make false accusations against the top brass of ISRO. He alleges that two IB officials had asked him to implicate A. E. Muthunayagam, his boss and then-director of the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC), saying that when he refused to comply, he was tortured until he collapsed and was hospitalised. He says his main complaint against ISRO is that it did not support him. K. Kasturirangan, who was ISRO chairman at the time, stated that ISRO could not interfere in a legal matter. He has written that the director of CBI Vijaya Rama Rao met him in jail on 8 December (four days after the case was transferred), when he explained to the director that the drawings of rockets and engines were not classified and has expressed that the CBI director wondered how the case had gotten so far and apologized in that meeting. saying that there was no espionage and that the testimonies of suspects were coerced by torture. In September 1999, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) passed strictures against the government of Kerala for having damaged Narayanan's distinguished career in space research along with the physical and mental torture to which he and his family were subjected. After the dismissal of charges against them, the two scientists, Sasikumar and Narayanan were transferred out of Thiruvananthapuram and were given desk jobs.

In 2001, the NHRC ordered the Government of Kerala to pay him a compensation of . He retired in 2001. The Kerala High Court ordered a compensation amount of to be paid to Nambi Narayanan based on an appeal from NHRC India in September 2012.

On 14 September 2018, the Supreme Court appointed a panel to probe the "harrowing" arrest and alleged torture of Narayanan. A three-judge bench led by Chief Justice Dipak Misra also awarded Narayanan in compensation for the mental cruelty he suffered all these years. The same month, Narayanan's name was recommended for Padma awards by Rajeev Chandrasekhar, then a BJP member of parliament.

Recent developments In 2021, the Kerala government settled the case filed against it by Narayanan by agreeing to a payment of .

On 14 April 2021 the Supreme Court of India ordered a CBI probe into the involvement of police officers in the conspiracy. Several of the involved police officers filed petitions in different courts in Kerala lodging documents which they claimed showed transfer of lands between 2004 and 2008 by Narayanan to various CBI officers involved in the investigation, were produced. The Kerala High Court dismissed the pleas, stating the documents did not show land sales but gave permission for the petitioners to file a fresh case if they could provide sale records .

Awards March 2019: Padma Bhushan, India's third-highest civilian award.