Ramji was raised in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Calcutta where his father KV Raghavan served as Managing Director of the ICI Group company, Alkali and Chemical Corporation of India Limited and later as Chairman of Engineers India Limited and President of EID Parry Limited. Ramji's father and his maternal uncle, Dr. P. K. Iyengar, former Chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission were founder trustees of Agastya International Foundation. A product of Rishi Valley School, founded by the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, Ramji was early on exposed to the power of self-awareness to create social change and dreamt of building a school for creative leaders in India. With support from the government of Andhra Pradesh, Ramji and his colleagues established a 172-acre campus creativity lab near Bangalore. In 2007 Agastya signed a MoU with stock market investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, which helped Agastya to scale its outreach activity and build its creative campus. 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. Ramji is married to Monica, great great granddaughter of Devkaran Nanjee, the founder of . Ramji holds an MBA from the London Business School and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Development Studies from The International Institute of Social Studies, The Netherlands. He graduated from Hans Raj College, University of Delhi.
Career
As per popular media, Ramji started his career as a consultant with A. F. Ferguson & Co., followed by Citibank in India, Puerto Rico and New York City. Later he worked with the Europe based Cedel Group as Director and member of the Strategic Advisory Group. In 1998, Ramji left his commercial career in banking and finance to create Agastya International Foundation, which has reached creative hands-on science education to over 12 million underprivileged children and 250,000 government school teachers across India. Under Ramji 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. In the late 1980s, Ramji met Janaki Ammal, wife of the mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan in Triplicane, Madras. In a blog appearing in a TIFR journal, Ramji mentions Mrs. Ramanujan telling him that “no one remembers my husband anymore.” More than a decade later, a bust of Ramanujan was installed in the Agastya campus creativity lab. Identical busts were installed in the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge University, the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
Recognitions
In 2009, Ramji was elected as a senior fellow by. In 2011, Ramji was featured on Indian TV channel Times Now in its program Amazing Indians and honoured with the People's Hero award by the Coimbatore unit of Confederation of Indian Industry at its silver jubilee celebrations. In 2012, Ramji was featured on CNBC Awaaz’s program "Bharat Bhagya Vidhata". Under Ramji's chairmanship Agastya International Foundation won the and was ranked by The Rockefeller Foundation among the top 100 global innovators. In 2016 Ramji received the Deshpande Foundation's Sandbox Catalyst Award from Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus and the Innovation for India award from the Marico Innovation Foundation Ramji and Rakesh Jhunjhunwala were also featured on CNBC TV's Daan Utsav programme. In 2017 Ramji was awarded The Rotary Club of Madras East Vocational Skilling Excellence Award. He was also featured in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. 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 Ramji and Agastya International Foundation were featured in the book, 7 Sutras of Innovation by Nikhil Inamdar, which tracks the journeys of eight organizations that have scaled up to become top players in their own fields and are transforming India.
