Dipak Nandy

Dipak Nandy is an Indian Marxist and academic who was the founder and first director of the Runnymede Trust, and a member of the Annan Committee.

Personal life

Born in Calcutta, India,in a Bengali Family on 21 May 1936, he was schooled at St. Xavier's College, where he won Tagore Gold Medal for English Essay. He arrived in Britain in March 1956 and, after working on the night shift of Cadbury Schweppes, he was offered a place in the English Literature Department at the University of Leeds. He has always maintained that Leeds, in the 1950s, was in range, variety and intellectual heft the most exciting place to be. At the beginning of his final year (1960), he met Margaret Gracie, whom he dated from 1960 to 1964. In 1964, after finishing, he married Margaret Gracie, in 1964 when he was a lecturer at Leicester University. They separated in 1971.^[1] In 1972 he married Anne Luise Byers, (daughter of the late Lord Byers, Leader of the Liberals in the House of Lords for 19 years), and their youngest daughter, Lisa Nandy was born in 1979. He left academia in 1968 to set up and run the Runnymede Trust of which he was the founder-Director 1968-1973. After a brief 'educational' break at Social and Community Planning Research 1973-74, he was recruited to act as a Special Consultant by the Home Office, to work on the Sex Discrimination Bill 1975, before part drafting the new Race Relations Bill 1976. In 1976, he went up to Manchester, where the Equal Opportunities Commission had been located, and remained its Deputy Director and chief policymaker for the next 10 years, 1976–86, where, among other work, he was intimately involved in driving through the Government's policy on taxation (The Taxation of Husband and Wife, by pressing for achieving in equalising the State Pension ages of men and women, and successfully briefed Liberal and Labour MPs and peers to redraft the Government's proposed amendment to the Equal Pay Act 1970. In 1979 he began to forge a link with the Directorate-General V of the European Commission, and organised a representative conference on issues remaining in the progress towards equal treatment of women throughout the 9 members of the European Commission in 1981, and acted as the Conference Secretary. He had always had a detailed personal interest in broadcasting as 'the way a society talks to itself', and served as the Chairman of the BBC's Immigrant Programme 1983-88 and as a member of its General Council 1983-90. He was appointed a member of the Committee of Inquiry into the Future of Broadcasting (chairman: Lord Annan), 1974–77, which created Channel 4 instead of the widely expected ITV2, and successfully lobbied through the Committee's report for a unified Broadcasting Complaints Commission.

Publications

• Race and Community 1968
• How to calculate immigration statistics, Runnymede Trust 1970
• Sir Peter Medawar O.M., C.H., C.B.E., F.R.S. 1915–1987. A Personal Memoir Runnymede Trust 1988

References