A distinguished statistician by profession , Shri K.M. Bashir belonged to the Indian Statistical Service and occupied responsible positions in the Government of India and later in the Bureau of Statistics, International Labour Organization (Geneva).
Born in 1925, in the village of Paravur in Quilon district, he was the first in his family to attain postgraduate education in Mathematics from Maharaja’s college in Trivandrum. After an initial job as a teacher, he joined the National Statistical Survey Organization in Bangalore. In this job, he travelled across many parts of South India, becoming intimately familiar with the socio-economic conditions and deep poverty of the people. Subsequently, he joined the Central Statistical Organization in New Delhi in 1960, from where he went to the International Labour Organization in Geneva in 1967 and stayed there until his retirement. Despite having lived almost two decades abroad, he returned to Kerala in the belief that he should return something to the society that had nurtured him and contributed to his success.
A great believer in the power of knowledge and education to transform human society, Shri K. M. Bashir also ardently promoted communal harmony and inter-religious understanding.
The VMFT was conceived by him as a centre of excellence for learning and research, as a forum to address the social, economic, intellectual, cultural, educational, spiritual and philosophical problems of the people, as a vehicle for disseminating and using advances in science and technology for the benefit of society, as a training centre and as an instrument for promoting, social justice and understanding and harmony among people.