Agastya International Foundation is an Indian education trust and non-profit organization based in Bangalore, India whose mission is to spark curiosity, nurture creativity and build confidence among economically disadvantaged children and teachers in India. A team of scientists, educators and entrepreneurs led by Ramji Raghavan founded Agastya in 1999. Agastya’s founders include the late KV Raghavan, former chairman of Engineers India Limited and Dr. PK 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 largest mobile, hands-on science education programs that caters to economically disadvantaged children and government school teachers in the world.
Programs
Campus Creativity Lab
Agastya has a "Campus Creativity Lab" located on a 172-acre campus in Kuppam, Andhra Pradesh, which houses science and art centers including an astronomy center and planetarium, center for creative teaching, an innovation hub, a science model-making center, the Ramanujan Math Park, an open-air ecology lab and many more. The campus receives over 650 children every day and also trains teachers from seven states in India.
Agastya's programs across India are also delivered by over 190 Mobile Lab and i Mobile Lab Vans, 90 Lab-on-Bikes and TechLaBikes, 100 Science Centers, nearly 700 night village school centers and trained over 30,000 Young Instructor Leaders. As of January 2020, Agastya has directly reached face-to-face over 12 million children and 250,000 teachers, from vulnerable and economically disadvantaged communities. As a charitable trust, Agastya is funded by corporate CSR, government and individual donations. In 2010, Agastya signed an MoU with the state government of Karnataka to establish core science activity centers in five districts in north Karnataka.
Awards and recognitions
Agastya won the GoogleGlobal Impact Award 2013 and was ranked by The Rockefeller Foundation NextCentury Awards among the top 100 global innovators. In 2016 Agastya’s founder and 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 In 2019 Agastya received an Andhra Pradesh State Green Award for its work in regenerating the ecosystem of its 172-acre campus, documented in a book, 'The Roots of Creativity'. In 2020, Agastya was featured in the book, 7 Sutras of Innovation by Nikhil Inamdar, as one of eight organizations in Indian “start-ups to scale-ups that are transforming India.”
