Agastya International Foundation

Agastya has a "Campus Creativity Lab" located on a 172-acre campus in Kuppam, Andhra Pradesh.[3][5] It houses science and art centers, including among other labs an astronomy center, a planetarium, a center for creative teaching, an innovation hub, a science model-making center, and the Ramanujan Math Park, an open-air ecology lab. The school has 800 teachers and 280 night school volunteers.[3] The campus welcomes over 650 children every day from 8 to 10 schools,[3] additionally, teachers from seven Indian states are trained here.[6]

The school has cumulatively reached over eight million with around 1.5 million children every year apart from 2.5 million teachers.[3] In 2016, the school had a ₹300 million ($4.1 million) annual budget, 850 employees, 138 mobile lab-vans, 50 labs on bikes, and 60 science centers spread around the 172-acre main campus in Kuppam.[3]

Agastya's programs across India are also delivered by over 190 Mobile Lab and iMobile Lab Vans, 90 Lab-on-Bikes and TechLaBikes, 100 Science Centers, and nearly 700 night village school centers. It has trained over 30,000 Young Instructor Leaders (peer-to-peer teachers). Through its Young Instructor Leader (YIL) program begun in 2007, the foundation promotes and nurtures children of exceptional ability to learn.[3] The program became a game-changer for many students, for example by teaching children to boost their organizational prowess and develop their decision-making skills. It also has encouraged many students to overcome stage fright.[3]

The foundation operates mobile labs that cover village schools in and around the district, thereby enabling children to perform experiments by themselves.[3] As of January 2020, Agastya has directly reached over 12 million children (50% girls) and 250,000 teachers from vulnerable and economically disadvantaged communities. As a charitable trust, Agastya is funded by Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) engagement and donations, governmental funding, and individual donations. In 2010, Agastya signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Karnataka state government to establish core science activity centers in five districts in north Karnataka.[7] The foundation conducted a science fair in Bihar in 2012 which reached out to 24,000 students and 1,100 teachers through a bequest of the Late Mr. Abdul Kalam (Ex-President of India) to sponsor a program in Bihar.[3]

One of the organization's central aims is to develop student curiosity in the world around them and to launch them on a path of lifetime discovery and understanding.[3]