[8] He graduated in Commerce with honours from American College, Madurai, coming first in the examination, and joined there as a lecturer[9] when he was inducted into Indian Administrative Service in 1956.
Later, he served as the District Collector of Adilabad, Khammam and Nellore before moving to the Union Government as a special assistant to Mohan Kumaramangalam, the then Minister for Steel and Mines.
[18] After the failure of talks with Naxal groups, he was involved with the activities of Safai Karmachari Andolan, founded by Bezwada Wilson, and served as a mentor to the organization.
Under his guidance, the initiative worked to free a majority of the manual laborers in the State handling human excreta till their number dwindled from 1.3 million to 300,000.
[3] Sankaran, who contributed a chapter, Administration and the Poor, to the 2002 publication, Dalits and the State by Ghanshyam Shah,[19] died on 7 October 2010, at the age of 75 in Hyderabad, succumbing to a cardiac arrest.
[5] On his birthday (22 October) in 2013, C. H. Hanumantha Rao, a former member of the National Advisory Council, released the first of the two-volume publication, Marginalisation, Development and Resistance: Essays in Tribute to SR Sankaran,[21] which detailed his contributions for the welfare of the marginalized communities.