The Adiseshiahs donated the land, buildings, furniture, equipment and made cash endowments to the newly constituted institute.
In 1985, the Reserve Bank of India established a chair for applied research in regional economics, which has since been converted to a fully autonomous unit in 2002.
The governing council consists of the chairperson, the institute's director as member-secretary, representatives of faculty, the Indian Council of Social Science Research, the Government of Tamil Nadu, and from the universities of the four South Indian states, trustees of the institute, and co-opted social scientists, as members.
[1] MIDS' research focuses on subjects like development and planning, centre-state relationship, poverty, inequality, agrarian issues, social movements, caste and communal politics.
Prominent faculty members of MIDS (both past and present) include Kaushik Basu, A R Venkatachalapathy, Padmini Swaminathan and K. Nagaraj.