Dr. Devanesan Nesiah, CCS: Things Work For The Good Of The Faithful
By S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole –March 20, 2017
Prof. S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole
On 20 March, 2017 Dr. Devanesan Nesiah (DN) will be honoured by the President on the National Honours list. By tradition, he only knows he is on the list but not exactly for what award. Nonetheless, I think it is useful to say something about him, his attitudes, and his will of steel even as he took all punishments that life handed him with composure and equanimity. As a matter of transparency, let me say he is my cousin-brother (we being the children of two sisters) and was my God Father at my baptism by my father at St. Paul’s Milagiriya. He hates the limelight so writing without consulting him, I accept responsibility for any minor mistakes in this.
Educated at CMS Chundikuli Girls’ College and St. John’s College initially, he moved to St. Thomas’ College when his father moved from St. John’s to teach there. He read “Maths Special” at the University of Ceylon (Colombo) and got an ordinary pass. He says he enjoyed life as a student should, focusing on all the nonacademic activities. It was a time when his father had been invited by Vice Chancellor Ivor Jennings to lead the Department of Education at Peradeniya. He sat the civil service exam, taking time off to study. Coming at the top in the exam portion and the bottom for the interview section, he made it into the 1959 CCS batch, the third batch before CCS’s abolition in 1963 and merger with the Divisional Revenue Officers’ Service into the CAS. I have become so cynical of our leaders that every time the government makes a speech purporting to advance a principle, I suspect it really wants to help a relation; in this case putting a related DRO into the CAS while berating the elitism of the abolished CCS.
DN’s early years were happy as AGA Badulla, GA Mannar and GA Batticaloa with happy holidays for all of us. However, by the time the CAS became SLAS, the deterioration through discrimination and corruption were readily obvious. Also DN’s father, K. Nesiah, played a major role in persuading the FP and Congress leaders in May 1972 to form the Tamil United Front, which later became the TULF; at which point, K. Nesiah resigned disagreeing with the Vaddukoddai resolution of 1976. It is said that K. Nesiah’s engagement in forming the TUF led to Mrs. Bandaranaike sending DN to the pool (where there is not even a desk to sit at and the officer goes in the mornings, signs in and returns home).
Every debacle somehow turned into something positive for DN. When the ILO team under Prof. Dudley Seers, Director of the Institute of Development Studies of the University of Sussex, came to examine the economic reasons for the 1971 JVP insurrection, DN was assigned from the Pool to the near-clerical task of coordinating Sears’ movements. Sears was impressed with DN and towards the end of the project offered him a scholarship at Sussex to read for an MA in development economics.
