Parameswaran Iyer

Parameswaran Iyer was born in Srinagar and his father was an Indian Air Force officer. He was educated at The Doon School in Dehradun, and then attended St. Stephen's College, Delhi. He then got a one-year exchange scholarship at Davidson College in North Carolina. Iyer joined the Indian Civil Services in 1981. In 2009, he took a voluntary retirement to become the water resources manager at the World Bank. Before he joined the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, Government of India, in 2016, he worked in Vietnam, China, Egypt, Lebanon and Washington for the World Bank.[8] He has been a columnist with the Indian Express. In 2016, he was appointed by the Government of India to implement Swachh Bharat Mission, the country-wide sanitation campaign to eliminate open defecation and improve solid waste management.[10] Iyer's modus operandi to achieve the strict goals under the mission (building 110 million toilets in 5 years) was unconventional and "non-bureaucratic".[1]

In 2020, Iyer resigned from the position and returned to the United States to join the World Bank and be close to his family.

Bibliography

• Method in the Madness. Harper Collin.
• The Swachh Bharat Revolution: Four Pillars of India's Behavioural Transformation. Harper Collin, 2019