Ramji Raghavan

In 1998, Mr. Raghavan left a career in banking in London to create Agastya (www.agastya.org), a transformative and innovative education charity that has grown to become one of the largest creative hands-on mobile education programs for economically disadvantaged children and government schoolteachers in the world.

Operating with a fleet of 200+ Mobile Labs, 95 Science Centers, 80 Lab-on-Bikes, 400 Operation Vasantha night village schools and a 172-acre campus Creativity Lab near Bangalore, Agastya has reached creative hands-on science and art education to over 13 million children and 250,000 teachers across 21 states in India. Agastya’s innovative TechLaBike won the Google 2013 Global Impact Award. Its Mobile Science Lab was featured among the 100 top global innovations by The Rockefeller Foundation’s NextCentury Awards and its Lab-on-a-Bike won the Marico Innovation for India Award 2016. Mr. Raghavan was featured in the book 7 Sutras of Innovation – Stories of Scale Ups That Are Transforming India.

Mr. Raghavan has served as a member of the Government of India’s Central Advisory Board of Education, the Prime Minister’s National Knowledge Commission (Working Group on attracting children to Science and Math), as a board member of The Indira Gandhi National Open University, Vigyan Prasar, New Delhi and the Karnataka State Innovation Council. Mr. Raghavan was elected as a Senior Fellow by Ashoka: Innovators for the public in 2009 and was conferred the People’s Hero Award by the Confederation of Indian Industry (Southern Zone) in 2011.

Mr. Raghavan has written articles on education for Indian and foreign journals and spoken on creativity and leadership to audiences at international and national forums including the Education World Forum, Harvard India Conference, Clinton Global Initiative, Peking University, Global Educator Leaders Program (Helsinki), Indian Institute of Science, Indian Institute of Technology, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore and the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) at Qatar. He has also addressed school and university students, faculty, entrepreneurs and corporate leaders and executives in India.

Education

MBA, London Business School. Post-Graduate Diploma in Development Studies, The International Institute of Social Studies, The Netherlands and BA (Econ) Hons, Delhi University. School: Rishi Valley.