As I explore different aspects of the education transition that we need globally, and is emerging, it is increasingly clear that schools (or what might replacement them) won't be the only thing required. There is a huge amount of possibility and power in a broader ecosystem of organisations and networks taking different roles in enabling a more creative, meaning-rich, relational educational experience for young people and for communities. This week it is a huge privilege to be able to share the story of one such organisation that has been quietly getting on with incredible and impactful work doing precisely this for the last few decades at an absolutely massive scale across India.
Ramji Raghavan is Founder Chairman of Agastya International Foundation. Ramji leads the world's largest hands-on Mobile Education Program for economically disadvantaged children and teachers. In 1998, Ramji left his commercial career in banking and finance to create Agastya International Foundation, to provide science education to over 25 million underprivileged children and 250,000 government school teachers across India. During his tenure, Agastya has pioneered many educational innovations at scale, including mobile science labs, lab-on-a-bike and peer-to-peer learning via mega science fairs for underprivileged children. Agastya's 172-acre campus creativity lab houses over fifteen experiential science, art and innovation centers, including the Ramanujan Math Park.
With support from the government of Andhra Pradesh, Ramji and his colleagues established a 172-acre campus creativity lab near Bangalore. In 2010 the Government of Karnataka signed a MoU with Agastya International Foundation to establish an ecosystem for hands-on science education in the state. Wisdom of Agastya, an illustrated book authored by Vasant Nayak and Shay Taylor of the MurthyNayak Foundation in Baltimore, USA, chronicles Ramji and his team's journey between 1999 and 2014 in building Agastya International Foundation.
In 2021 Agastya announced the creation of Navam Innovation Foundation in partnership with the Pravaha Foundation of Hyderabad.
Ramji was a member of the Prime Minister’s National Knowledge Commission (Working Group on attracting children to Science and Math), is a member of the board of Vigyan Prasar, New Delhi, the Karnataka State Innovation Council and Executive Council member of the Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum. In 2009, he was elected a Senior Fellow by Ashoka and in 2011 he was conferred the People’s Hero Award by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) (Southern Zone).
https://www.agastya.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramji_Raghavan
@AgastyaOrg on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AgastyaOrg
The book: 'The Moving of Mountains: The Remarkable Story of the Agastya International Foundation' by Adhirath Sethi (LID Publications): https://adhirathsethi.com/the-moving-of-mountains
David Penburg's article about his time at Agastya, The Owl That Flies Silently: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bEeVpAE8J8LS5JAQJYxtrYEEVX2G6Ju7/view?usp=sharing