The Moving of Mountains: The Remarkable Story of The Agastya International Foundation
By Adhirath Sethi
Penguin Enterprise

‘The Moving of Mountains’, with a foreword by A.S. Kiran Kumar, former chairman of ISRO, offers an inspiring narrative of perseverance, innovation, and the power of education to transform lives. It delves deep into Agastya's 25-year journey, from its humble beginnings to becoming a global movement that touches over 5 million students annually.

Through its pages, readers will learn about the challenges faced, the successes achieved, and the inspiring movement that has changed the lives of millions of children.

The book also celebrates the supporters like the late Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, who invested Rs 50 crore, believing innovation is key to India’s future. N. Narayana Murthy, founder of Infosys, praises Agastya for using technology, such as augmented reality and the metaverse, to reach remote areas with education.

It provides an in-depth look at highlighting some key milestones, such as the launch of the First Mobile Science Lab (2022), the creation of the First Science Centre (2005), and the visit of President APJ Abdul Kalam (2006) to Agastya’s Mobile Lab. It also covers the Google Global Impact Award (2013-14) and the ambitious Agastya 2.0 (2022) goal of reaching 100 million children by 2032.

‘The Moving of Mountains’ is not just a book about education; it is a call to action for those who believe in the power of curiosity, creativity, and the potential of India’s youth to shape the future.

The author, Adhirath Sethi, is a trustee for the Agastya International Foundation. He is an alumnus of The Rishi Valley School, Eton College, and the London School of Economics.

Here’s an excerpt from the book:

According to [Agastya International Foundation founder] Ramji [Raghavan], ‘Agastya knew one big thing, namely the value of curiosity and creativity and the methods to trigger them. It had never lost sight if this. But it also needed multiple pathways and angles to achieve its goals. The key was knowing when to be which.’

Agastya’s carefully constructed and meticulously honed philosophy on education had gone deeper than any other grassroot initiative had dared to. With this at its core, it allowed its eclectic team of academics, ex-corporates and an army of BEEs (bachelors of energy and enthusiasm; see Chapter 6) to use every trick in the book to facilitate its proliferation. It is in finding that balance that the foundation has flourished.

By 2008, Agastya’s name had become somewhat synonymous with hands-on education. In February of that year, Sam Pitroda, the chair of the prime minister’s National Knowledge Commission,2 invited Ramji to join the commission’s working group on attracting children to science and math.

Members of the commission visited an Agastya science fair and the campus. During this time, the members also inaugurated the Jhunjhunwala Discovery Centre, which was finally ready after two years in development.

Impressed with what they had witnessed, the commission asked the foundation to present a plan for expanding the Agastya model across India. The plan recommended a massive expansion of mobile science labs and science centres, student peer-to-peer teaching, and the creation of 20 campuses like the one at Gudupalle across the country. The investment in the programme would have equalled less than 3 per cent of the education budget of the nation at the time, and some of it would be contributed by the private sector. The benefits would be massive. The Agastya management predicted that the programme would have a groundswell impact on innovation and that Indian education would be transformed within fifteen years. The commission recommended a number of Agastya innovations, among them mobile labs and the Young Instructor Leader programme, to popularize science at the grassroots. Budget constraints, however, prevented the plan from becoming operational. In time, with the dissolution of the knowledge commission, this particular opportunity faded completely.

It was, however, encouraging to note that Agastya—which still operated within the confines of some key hubs in South India—was being recognized nationally. In addition, Ramji was now specifically being asked to come and give talks on education, and this was bringing in interest from corporates and high-net-worth individuals from across the world. It gave the team the impetus to start thinking about a pan-India presence.

From the very beginning, the founders were keen that Agastya should evolve from being a singular organization to becoming an educational movement that covered the country and left no child behind. To facilitate this, Ramji often declared that he had no qualms about other foundations using models developed by Agastya to further the cause of hands-on education in India. The process of planting seeds and observing how they grew was set into the Agastya culture from the start. In 2009, the team would glimpse a rather unexpected and fantastic result of this approach. Like so many things relating to Agastya, it was wholly organic and—once recognized—brilliantly adopted for mass dissemination.

It happened one evening, when Ramji took a guest from the Agastya campus to a village nearby where Agastya had taken to doing some community events at night. The night visits were a necessity-based innovation that had originated with a meeting that Ramji had had with a government official of the Chittoor district in Andhra Pradesh. The official had asked Ramji to review an initiative that the government was undertaking in the villages. While interviewing a woman from one of the villages, Ramji noticed her young son clinging to her saree. Ramji asked the boy whether he had seen an Agastya mobile lab. The boy nodded and went on to describe a biology model he had seen. However, the mother seemed completely unaware of her own son’s interactions with Agastya. The community night visits were suggested as a way to bridge this gap and create awareness among the parents.

It was an almost ethereal sight: a group of children staring enrapt at an instructor as the humble glow of a solar lamp illuminated him and the experiments that he was guiding them through. Like any such event should be, the noise quotient was high as peals of laughter and shrieks of excitement filled the warm evening air. At the insistence of the guest, he and Ramji climbed to the terrace of a nearby house to take pictures from a better vantage point. It was then that they spotted a girl, away from the rest of the crowd, surrounded by a few children. She appeared to be holding a model in her hand and explaining it to her younger brethren.

Intrigued, Ramji went up to her and asked why she was not with the rest of the group.

‘I like to teach,’ she replied and then pointed to the mobile lab. ‘The things the Agastya teacher teaches—I like to continue teaching the children here.’

She showed them a model of the food chain that she had borrowed from the mobile lab. She said that she had gone through Agastya’s programmes when she was younger and now wanted to use what she knew to help other children. Leading them to her home, a modest room, she showed them a blackboard and a piece of chalk.

‘I teach here every night,’ she said with a big smile. ‘What’s your name?’ Ramji asked.

She replied, ‘Vasantha.’

The sheer simplicity of the idea astounded the Agastya team.

Operation Vasantha (OV), as the night-school concept would come to be known, was remarkably scalable and low cost, and could use the force multiplier effect to project Agastya’s impact without adding more staff. In effect, it was a levelling-up of the peer-to-peer teaching structure that Agastya had pioneered years earlier, now being taken forward by the very students in whom Agastya had once nurtured curiosity.

[The excerpt reproduced with the permission of the publishers.]