Leading Edge
Agastya International
Foundation imparts science education to children in villages, but more
importantly it is nurturing creativity and grooming tomorrow's leaders of rural
India
R Sravani came across
Agastya Interna tional Foundation as a sixth grade stu dent in the village of
Shantipuram in Andhra Pradesh. Her parents are poor.
When she was a baby, her
father had found it hard to make enough money to make ends meet. Studying in a
poorly equipped government school, she grew up as a timid child till well into
middle school. Her fortunes changed, she says, after she was exposed to the
foundation.
Agastya was by then rapidly
develop ing into one of the largest experiments in the world in science
education. Founded in the year 2000 by Ramji Raghavan, a former investment
banker, Agastya had set up a large campus in Kuppam with well-equipped labs.
Its mobile labs went into village schools in the district and beyond, making
children do experiments with their own hands. Like everyone else, Sravani
enjoyed the experiments, and looked forward to the day when she would go to the
Agastya campus or see a mobile lab. Then she was chosen as a young instructor
leader by Agastya.
Agastya had conceived the
Young Instructor Leader (YIL) programme in 2007. Children who show exceptional
ability to learn are trained by the founda tion and then made to teach science
to other children. The foundation has over 7,000 Young Instructor Leaders
spread over south India and parts of north India.The programme was a
game-changer for many students. “I lost my fear once I became a young leader,“
says Sravani. “I became confident about going on stage and speaking.“ The
increase in confidence was not just in public speaking. She also learned how to
organise her life.
Now she is the lead
strategist of the family, advising her father -who works as a field
verification officer in the Andhra Pradesh government -on how to take decisions
on her education, finance and other family matters. She has explained to her mother
the importance of learning, and told them that they would have to work hard
till she finished her education. A few years ago, she persuaded her father not
to sell their cow, explaining how it was an investment for the future. Now they
have four cows, and earn `12,000 a month selling milk, with which they fund
Sravani's education at the expensive Sri Gayatri Junior College.
Leaders of Today &
Tomorrow
Other young leaders have
similar tales to share. R Azad, a XIIth standard student, organises cleaning programmes
in his village, and is working on an idea to curb drunken driving. M Maheswari,
earlier a sixth standard dropout, came back to school after contact with
Agastya and is now an undergraduate student in commerce, and also manages a
night learning programme in her village. Many students have gone on to do well
for themselves, studying in professional colleges and looking forward to good
careers.“Even if Agastya fails to teach them science,“ says VK Aatre, former
scientific advisor to the defence minister and now a trustee of Agastya, “it is
worth it because it gives the children confidence.“
Aatre has been associated
with the foundation from 2004, when he provided Raghavan with ideas on how to
get science inside young minds. Later, when he retired and came back to
Bengaluru, Aatre got more involved with Agastya and became a trustee. He
influenced the foundation to start science centres, and to spark creativity in
children rather than to teach them complicated science. According to the
Agastya management and supporters, nurturing creativity in children has
longterm benefits, especially in rural areas. “We need many solutions to the
country's problems,“ says Gururaj Deshpande, entrepreneur and philanthropist
who is one of the big donors for Agastya.“And in the impoverished communities,
the solutions have to come from the grassroots.“
A solution from Delhi
policymakers or top-notch labs around the world may not work in rural areas,
according to Deshpande, because villages have no capacity to absorb them. Professionals
and decision-makers who come from the rural areas, after growing up with the
problems, look at things differently. “When the Young Instructor Leaders of
Agastya grow up,“ says Deshpande, “they will have the capacity to understand
the problems well.“ Many young leaders choose to remain in villages and work
towards a living there.
The statistics of Agastya
are already impressive. It works on an annual budget of `30 crore and has 850
employees. It has 138 mobile lab vans, 50 labs on bikes, and 60 science
centres. Its main campus in Kuppam is spread across 172 acres, and gets 500
young visitors from eight to 10 schools every day. It has 800 teachers,
including 280 night-school volunteers. Agastya has scaled well over the years,
reaching eight million children cumulatively. It now reaches 1.5 million
children every year, apart from 2,50,000 teachers.“Agastya has exceeded my
expectations about the number of people it has reached,“ says investor and
philanthropist Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, a big supporter of the foundation.
Powerful Backing
It has had support from
some of the best of minds in the country too. Aatre has especially been
instrumental in getting the Indian scientific community to spend time with
Agast ya. He had aroused the interest of his former boss and president APJ
Abdul Kalam, who had been visiting the Agastya campus and asking Ramji Raghavan
for a while to start a programme in Bihar. About four years ago, Raghavan got a
call from Kalam, saying that he would sponsor a programme in Bihar.Agastya
conducted a science fair there in the year 2012 that reached about 24,000
students and 1,100 teachers.
Aatre had also got senior
scientists from other organisations to provide ideas, build models and create
systems for teaching and training. R Krishnan, former director of the Gas
Turbine Research Establishment (GTRE), helped develop some of the initial
ideas. Another early intellectual supporter was PK Iyengar, former chairman of
the Atomic Energy Commission. M Shivakumar, former chief designer at HMT, created
a large number of models for experiments. Revathy Narayanan, a doctorate from
the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and now a social worker, developed all
the teacher's training modules and documentation.
Raghavan himself had a wide
network, and got help from a large number of philanthropists in the country.
Investor Jhunjhunwala is Agastya's biggest donor, committing `50 crore over 10
years. The State Bank of India is the second biggest. Gururaj Desh pande is a
large donor through his foundation. AM Naik, executive chairman of Larsen &
Toubro, has made substantial contributions as an individual. So have NR
Narayana Murthy and Sudha Murthy through the Infosys Science Foundation and
Infosys Foundation. The Murthys' donation is specifically for training teachers.“Inspiring
teachers is the best way,“ says Narayana Murthy, “because teachers have a
multiplier effect.“
The schools around Kuppam,
where Agastya has been operating a 172-acre campus for a decade and a half,
have now accepted Agastya as being part of their lives.
The campus works with about
80 schools in a radius of 25 km, as students in these schools make several
visits to the campus every year. In addition, mobile labs go to the schools
with science kits that students can play with. The campus is also an ecological
experiment, with a resident ecologist carefully selecting each plant and
creating a thriving ecosystem. Students who go there come back with a
heightened sense of awareness about ecology, and have been creating pressure on
their farming communities to be more ecologically sensitive.
Shining Big & Bright
Gudlinayanipalli school,
about 10 km from the campus, is in one the poorest regions in the district. It
has just one dilapidated building, and that too built partly with help from
Sudha Murthy. Many children come to school here without breakfast, as their
parents leave for work early. The headmaster, Ram Mohan, says that children get
too hungry by mid-morning and then would wait eagerly for their mid-day meal.
This school has done enough to get first prize in the district for the Inspire
model-making award, given by the department of science and technology. “The
interest of my students in science has gone up,“ says headmaster Ram Mohan,
“since Agastya teaches them about what is important in their own lives.“
After Agastya became
prominent in the area, children from government schools
have been faring well in
national science competitions. Two students have won places among the top ten
in last year's Design for Change challenge. In the last five years, 17 students
have won a prize in the Iris National Fair, including silver and bronze medals.
Two years ago, the
foundation won the Google Impact Challenge for a technology-driven lab on a
bike, which can be driven by the teacher to the villages and used for
instruction in science. It gave them `3 crore, enough money for 30 such bikes
for three years.
As Agastya's name spread
across the world, it has been sought by well-known educators for experiments on
educational innovation. The Franklin W Olin College of Engineering in
Massachusetts started a programme with Agastya on project-based learning.
Agastya is beginning to use Raspberry Pi, the low-cost computer developed by
Raspberry Foundation in the UK. It is also using the Foldscope, the ultracheap
cardboard microscope designed by Manu Prakash, assistant professor at Stanford
University. Hayagreeva Rao, professor at Stanford Business School, works with
Agastya on a project about design thinking.
This 100-school pilot will
explore ways of ideation, designing a problem, prototyping and so on. “As they
grow,“ says Rao, “organisations must learn to drop things that made them
successful. Agastya has learned to do that well.“
Agastya has reached eight
million children, and so can claim to have achieved scale. However, in a
country of 164 million children, it still remains small. “I am not sure how
scalable is Agastya's model,“ says Narayana Murthy. “You need a certain amount
of teachers, equipment and so on.
But I am sure they will
find solutions to these problems.“ To reach all over the country, the
foundation may have to expand 100-fold. It is nearly impossible, but its recent
history provides glimpses of what can be achieved if they do so.
Sparking Curiosity
One of the aims of the
foundation is to spark the student's curiosity in the world around us, and to
set him or her on the way to a lifetime of discovery. “We are trying to create
early in children the fundamental ability to abstract,“ says K Thiagarajan,
chief of operations at Agastya. In the process, the students also learn about
the world around them and acquire leadership abilities. They also have an
impact on the communities in which they live. “We see children from Agastya
teaching other children in the village,“ says D Krishnamurthy, sarpanch of the
villages around Cheekatipally near Kuppam. As they grow up, they teach their
parents about computers and the internet, the basics of electricity and so on.
The truly inspired students have an even bigger impact, questioning the values
and practices of the community.
All those who see the
students at work are impressed by their creativity. SV Ranganath, former chief
secretary of Karnataka, decided five years ago to take a day off and visit
Agastya's Kuppam campus. Agastya hadn't then started operations in Karnataka,
and its managers were prodding the state government for help in starting work
in the state schools. Ranganath says he was taken aback by what he saw. “I saw
some fifth grade students playing in the math lab,“ he says. “I asked them how
they could prove (a+b)2 = a2 + b2 + 2ab.“ One student quickly drew a square
with sides of a+b, and proceeded to prove the result on the board. He had not
learned the proof in school. “Many such students exist in the villages,“ says
Ranganath. “Imagine what we can achieve if we provide them
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Hari Pulakkat
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ETM10JAN16
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