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Agastya International Foundation (Agastya)^[1] is an Indian education trust and non-profit organization based in Bangalore, India whose mission is "to spark curiosity, nurture creativity and instil confidence" among economically disadvantaged children and teachers in India.^[2] A team of scientists, educators, and entrepreneurs led by Ramji Raghavan founded Agastya in 1999.^[3] Agastya's founders include the late K.V. Raghavan, former chairman of Engineers India Limited and Dr. P.K. Iyengar, former chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission. Agastya runs hands-on science and art education programs in rural, semi-urban, and urban regions across 19 Indian states. It is one of the world's largest mobile and hands-on science education programs catering to economically disadvantaged children and public-school teachers.^[4]

Agastya has a "Campus Creativity Lab" located on a 172-acre campus in Kuppam, Andhra Pradesh.^[3][5] It houses science and art centers, including among other labs an astronomy center, a planetarium, a center for creative teaching, an innovation hub, a science model-making center, and the Ramanujan Math Park, an open-air ecology lab. The school has 800 teachers and 280 night school volunteers.^[3] The campus welcomes over 650 children every day from 8 to 10 schools,^[3] additionally, teachers from seven Indian states are trained here.^[6]

The school has cumulatively reached over eight million with around 1.5 million children every year apart from 2.5 million teachers.^[3] In 2016, the school had a ₹300 million ($4.1 million) annual budget, 850 employees, 138 mobile lab-vans, 50 labs on bikes, and 60 science centers spread around the 172-acre main campus in Kuppam.^[3]

Agastya's programs across India are also delivered by over 190 Mobile Lab and iMobile Lab Vans, 90 Lab-on-Bikes and TechLaBikes, 100 Science Centers, and nearly 700 night village school centers. It has trained over 30,000 Young Instructor Leaders (peer-to-peer teachers). Through its Young Instructor Leader (YIL) program begun in 2007, the foundation promotes and nurtures children of exceptional ability to learn.^[3] The program became a game-changer for many students, for example by teaching children to boost their organizational prowess and develop their decision-making skills. It also has encouraged many students to overcome stage fright.^[3]

The foundation operates mobile labs that cover village schools in and around the district, thereby enabling children to perform experiments by themselves.^[3] As of January 2020, Agastya has directly reached over 12 million children (50% girls) and 250,000 teachers from vulnerable and economically disadvantaged communities. As a charitable trust, Agastya is funded by Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) engagement and donations, governmental funding, and individual donations. In 2010, Agastya signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Karnataka state government to establish core science activity centers in five districts in north Karnataka.^[7] The foundation conducted a science fair in Bihar in 2012 which reached out to 24,000 students and 1,100 teachers through a bequest of the Late Mr. Abdul Kalam (Ex-President of India) to sponsor a program in Bihar.^[3]

One of the organization's central aims is to develop student curiosity in the world around them and to launch them on a path of lifetime discovery and understanding.^[3]

As a result of the COVID-19 outbreak (2020) Agastya has provided online training for public school teachers in over 15 states, and has helped students set up science labs at home.^[8]

Agastya won the Google Global Impact Award in 2013^[9] and was ranked among the top 100 global innovators by The Rockefeller Foundation Next Century Awards.^[10] In 2016, Agastya's founder Ramji Raghavan received the Deshpande Foundation's Sandbox Catalyst Award from Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus and the Innovation for India Award from the Marico Innovation Foundation.^[11]

In 2019 Agastya received an Andhra Pradesh State Green Award for its work to regenerate the ecosystem of its 172-acre campus, which is documented in the book, 'The Roots of Creativity'.^[12] In 2020, Agastya was featured in the book, 'Seven Sutras of Innovation' by Nikhil Inamdar, as one of eight organizations in India that as "start-ups to scale-ups are transforming India". As the organization's efforts have gained recognition around the world, it has been approached by well-known educational organizations for experiments in educational innovation.^[3] The project-based learning program, for example, was started by Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts with Agastya.^[3]

• Official website