31st December – The New Years

Story of Agastya International Foundation - Igniting rural minds

The last day of the year began with all of us waking up to Suprabhat bhajan on the PA system. Urrrgg… Against all my wishes, I got down from my berth to head to the bathroom bogie. I don’t remember the exact time, but it was pretty early in the morning when we got down at Yaswantpur Station in Karnataka. The branding team was busy with putting up banners on the buses. And yeah, I had quit the branding team by then as I couldn’t sacrifice one hour of sleep every morning.

The road trip from Yastwantpur station to Agastya International Foundation must have been the longest ride that we had undertaken. Agastya International Foundation, a non profit educational trust, lay on the Andhra Pradesh-Karnataka border. It was not a very eventful ride apart from a few New Year celebration plans underway and the buses getting stuck at Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh border apparently due to the Telangana issue.

Somehow, the TJY team managed to get us out of the mess and we reached Agastya Foundation by 4.00 pm instead of 2.00 pm. The rural campus of Agastya International Foundation was beautiful. In the middle of green hills, a tent had been put up to accommodate 400 yatris.
We sat there to know more about Agastya International Foundation from its founder, Ramji Raghvan. A former NRI, Ramji Raghavan quit his banking job and came back to India to do something in the educational sector. And so Agastya International Foundation was born in the year 1999 to provide education to rural children and teachers. The foundation focuses on science education and aims to spark curiosity among the children. They want the children to ask more questions rather than just rote learn the answers from the textbook.

Agastya Foundation also works with government schools in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka through outreach programmes. Mobile Science labs move from school to school to teach and demonstrate simple scientific experiments. These experiments are done using simple yet gripping techniques that can be replicated by students in their own environment. The sole aim of this exercise is to foster interest in science. Apart from mobile labs, Agastya International Foundation also runs other interesting parallel programmes like science fairs, teacher development programmes, young instructor programme, arts on wheels programme and many more.

Agastya Foundation is completely dependent on donations. Though, there is government funding too, its extent is limited. Raghavan over the next seven years, plans to reach 4-5 million children in rural India. He wants to set up 50 more mobile labs and expand his staff capacity to 600 employees.

The best New Year, I’ve ever had

By the time we left the village to head back to Karnataka, it was already dark. We thought our New Year was doomed to be celebrated in the buses. Thankfully, God blessed us and we reached Yaswantpur station by 11.20 pm. And then the celebrations began!! The station was brought to life with delicious food on the platform, a huge cake, dholak music and an in house deejay system. The whole train was empty and the platform was full. The yatris, the TJY team members, the caterers danced till 2 in the morning to Punjabi and Bollywood tunes on the platform. Obviously, the Tata Jagriti Yatra Team had coordinated the whole event with the station authorities. Cheers to them!