Filling a Holy Ocean
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.
About the Author
Adhirath Sethi is a businessman and author, based in Bangalore. He is also a trustee for the Agastya Foundation.
He is an alumnus of The Rishi Valley School, Eton College, and the London School of Economics.
A former management consultant with The Boston Consulting Group, he took an all too eager plunge into entrepreneurship in 2008. As the Director and CEO of Poly Fluoro Ltd, he has worked to grow the company and establish its reputation as one of the leading manufacturers in the field of high-performance polymers.
His first book – The Debt Collector’s Due – was published by HarperCollins in 2015 and draws on his own experiences with hiring debt collectors to recover funds for his business. The book has presently been optioned for being made into a mini-series.
His second book – Where the Hills Hide their Secrets – published in 2019 – is set in post-colonial India, where the murder of a local woman sends secrets and scandals spilling out of the woodwork across the fictitious hill-station town of Nalanoor.
He has recently finished a third work of fiction – Searching for Saanvi. It is a love story, wrapped in an adventure, wrapped in the coming-of-age saga of a young man, who falls in love with a girl when he is 10 years old, only to spend the next 15 years looking for her after she mysteriously disappears.
In 2019, to commemorate Agastya’s two decades since inception, a proposal was put forth to capture the story of the foundation’s remarkable journey. The advent of COVID meant that this plan was temporarily put on hold. However, in 2021, the idea was revived and Adhirath offered his time to bring the book to life. He spent the first half of 2022 interviewing anyone that might have insights into Agastya. Speaking with everyone from front-line workers to donors, to board members, and senior management, the inside story of Agastya began to emerge. The Moving of Mountains is thus infused with the distilled learnings from thought leaders, captains of industry, staff, and the founders themselves.
As a board member of the Agastya Foundation and as Chairman of the Navam Foundation, Adhirath’s involvement in the NGO space spans over 10 years and includes contributions to fund raising, operations management, and strategy.
He lives in Bangalore, where he divides his time between his work, his writing, his family, and Agastya.
