Filling a Holy Ocean
June 9, 2024
To tell the story of Mounika is to extract but a single, splendid strand from the rich tapestry woven by the Agastya International Foundation across rural India. A weak student on her best day, Mounika had resigned to the fact that her father would be marrying her off soon. It was common for girls in her village to be married young and Mounika was no exception.
Her life changed when she was persuaded by a friend to visit the Agastya campus and observed an Agastya instructor demonstrating how blood tests were conducted. After having her finger pricked, Mounika watched in amazement as her blood was analyzed and her blood group determined. This ‘pinprick moment’ was enough to ignite the young lady into making an outlandish wager with her father: if she was able to place first in school, could she be sent to college instead of being married off?
Convinced that there was nothing to lose, her father agreed. Mounika achieved the top rank in her school exams and went on to college, where she became a student leader. Creating a single such pinprick moment is challenging enough. And yet, the Agastya Foundation was convinced that it could scale such experiences to millions of government school children spread across India.
Agastya’s unconventional concept of Aah! Aha! HaHa! encourages children to be curious about the world (Aah!), seek the knowledge to feed that curiosity (Aha!), and to further explore the joy that comes with the knowledge (HaHa!) By taking science, art, and design thinking to the remotest corners of India, Agastya’s mission to spark curiosity, nurture creativity, and foster a culture of caring and confidence has brought forth a myriad of anecdotes closely resembling the story of Mounika. What started at Agastya’s 172-acre campus in the village of Gudupalle in South India, soon moved like wildfire via a host of delivery mechanisms including mobile science labs, labs on bikes, labs in boxes, satellite night schools, and strategically placed science centers spread over 23 states in India.
In 2024, as Agastya reaches its 25th year, a new book titled “The Moving of Mountains” describes how a bootstrapped, inexperienced organization altered the very landscape of Indian grassroots education. The story explores the various trials and hard-won victories that a nascent non-profit experiences with regards to fundraising, program development, recruitment, training, and people management. However, the key strength of Agastya has been taking that which works on a micro level and allowing it to thrive – almost paradoxically – at a macro level. This hybrid zone is what Agastya friend and Stanford mathematician Tadashi Tokieda coined as being a “mezzo zone”.
Agastya’s success in consistently scaling its programs to reach over 25 million children over a quarter of a century is a lesson in pure organizational design thinking. It holds relevance not only for other non-profits and budding social entrepreneurs, but for corporates that often find that scale feeds off the very core values that made their organization unique to begin with.
When Agastya first started, the question that was asked was whether they would rather cater to the specific needs of a select few gifted students or to the broader needs of disadvantaged children across India. In choosing the latter, Agastya maintained that rather than fill a glass with holy water, they opted instead to raise the level of the ocean by a millimeter.
As Agastya embarks on an ever more audacious plan to reach 100 million children over the next decade, it believes that what it now needs to do is to fill a holy ocean. One hundred million pinpricks to energize a nation’s youngest minds into a tidal wave of creativity and innovation that will shape India – and indeed the world – for decades to come.
The Moving of Mountains will be released on 18th June 2024 in the US and is presently available for pre-order.
