A compelling new book The Moving of Mountains (Penguin Enterprise) by Adhirath Sethi traces the 25-year journey of Agastya Foundation, a grassroots education movement that has quietly become a global model for innovation in science education. In villages where electricity was once a luxury, Agastya바카라™s mobile science labs, innovation hubs, and creative learning centres are helping over 424,000 girls learn to code, build, experiment바카라”and lead.
Excerpt:
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.
바카라˜I like to teach,바카라™ she replied and then pointed to the mobile lab. 바카라˜The things the Agastya teacher teaches바카라”I like to continue teaching the children here.바카라™
She showed them a model of the food chain that she had borrowed from the mobile lab. She said that she had gone through Agastya바카라™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.
바카라˜I teach here every night,바카라™ she said with a big smile. 바카라˜What바카라™s your name?바카라™ Ramji asked.
She replied, 바카라˜Vasantha.바카라™
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 Agastya바카라™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 programme became extremely popular among the children, their parents and the schoolteachers. The parents were happy that the children were learning and not watching TV or creating mischief. The children said that they much preferred the hands-on classes to sitting at home and doing chores for their parents. The schoolteachers felt that the children came to class well prepared and with their homework completed. Everyone, it would appear, was winning.
The OV volunteers were typically young women aged between eighteen and twenty-five. Sometimes they were college students who had returned home (often because their family believed it was time to get them married!) and had time in the evening to engage with the children.
Agastya began to support the volunteers with a modest stipend and by supplying them with the models and even the training they needed to execute their tasks. Teaching and engaging with a class of some thirty children every night, the OV volunteers gained enormous knowledge, confidence, and
communication and interpersonal skills. The community was happy that one of their own was teaching their children.
OV was a low-tech, high-impact grassroots operation that began to quickly spread across the Agastya network and beyond. It complemented and reinforced the mobile lab sessions.
But managing the growing army of volunteers was no mean feat.
In 2005, Jayamma P.S. was working near Gudupalle when she heard about Agastya and the work it was doing. Despite her misgivings about being unqualified to join what she considered an 바카라˜international project,바카라™ she really felt she needed to be a part of Agastya.
바카라˜I lived in a village at that time,바카라™ she recollects. 바카라˜I would leave at 5.30 a.m. and reach Gudupalle3 by 7 a.m. From there it was 4 kilometres to campus. When I first saw the campus, I really felt I wanted to work there. I used to also see the mobile labs going up and down and it sparked my interest. I was the first woman to work at the Agastya campus. Ramji called me and he even spoke with my husband, Raghava, to ask if it was safe. Raghava was worried, but I wanted to work here even if there were struggles.바카라™
Jayamma busied herself for a few years by working on campus in various capacities as required. An energetic personality blessed with unique compassion, her brand equity within Agastya would skyrocket with the emergence of OV. As it transpired, the OV volunteers were very receptive to her, and she was entrusted with the coordination of the programme. Under Jayamma바카라™s wing, OV would grow to cover 700 villages in India and monumentally boost Agastya바카라™s reach. Every evening, some 18,000 children would gather around an eager OV instructor and learn new things about science. OV was a shining example of the kind of movement that Agastya바카라™s momentum could create and remains one of the most successful initiatives that the foundation has launched.
Within Agastya, Jayamma is referred to as the 바카라˜Mother of OV.바카라™ To the young volunteers she shepherds, she is simply 바카라˜Agastya Madam.바카라™
The OV origin story is in and of itself a heart-warming example of Agastya바카라™s ability to spot potential in the quietest corners and infuse purpose into that potential to drive change. With Agastya now approaching its tenth year, such anecdotes were becoming more frequent, although no less touching and worthy of reflection. Agastya바카라™s methods did not promise any overnight change in exam marks or economic conditions. In terms of impact, it would still be a few years before any formal metrics were tracked to quantify the Agastya effect across the organization. But a decade of sparking curiosity was slowly starting to stoke flames that were difficult to ignore. In these flames, Agastya saw the beginnings of an inferno that could one day lift a nation of underprivileged children to soar well above their circumstances.
On a hot summer day, two young village girls바카라”Rani and Roja바카라”were seeking refuge from a pitiless sun. They settled under the welcome shade of a peepul tree and, as friends are wont to do, commenced chatting about whatever it was that held their fancy that morning.
As they continued chatting, their curious minds led them down a path of inquiry that had game-changing consequences.
They started with a question: 바카라˜Why do we feel cool sitting under the shade of a tree?바카라™
This led to a follow-up question: 바카라˜Is there a difference in the cooling properties of different leaves?바카라™
Rani and Roja바카라™s investigation at Agastya into the cooling properties of leaves would win them the Special Award at the IRIS National Prize. It was noteworthy, considering that IRIS (the Initiative for Research and Innovation in STEM) invited nearly a thousand students from across the country to
compete. This meant that the girls were up against children from private schools, who had the resources and the time to create far more elaborate studies and experiments.
