Science education revolution in rural India

Every day, in a rare feat of organisational efficiency and management, 259 Agastya teacher-instructors disseminate hands-on science education to over 4,800 government school children in ten states through its science centre in Kuppam, 28 satellite science centres and 61 mobile science vans, sparking a belated science education revolution in rural India. Summiya Yasmeen reports. Santosh Banakar, Bhargavi Lokeshwari, Jyothsana Thirupati, Pramod Patil and Anuradha Gangadaharmath — all students of government schools struggling in impoverished rural hamlets of the southern states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh — achieved the impossible at Intels IRIS (Initiative in Research and Innovations in Science) 2011 national science fair, held in Chandigarh last November. All five students, first generation learners whose unskilled farm labour parents never attended school, won special merit awards at IRIS, a pan-India annual science competition for primary-secondary school students organised by IT multinational Intel in partnership with the Union governments department of science and technology and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). The students well-researched proj-ects presented to a jury comprising eminent scientists Dr. Harish Bhat (IISc), Prof. R. Srinivasan (IIT-Guwahati) and Dr. R.K. Paul (St. Xaviers College, Kolkata), detailing the multi-purpose uses of animal waste and benefits of citrus peel oil as organic pesticide, were adjudged the best of 1,000 entries from 58 schools countrywide. Moreover Bhargavi and Jyothsanas project ‘Growing oxygen on the highways was singled for a special award, winning them a fully-paid trip to participate in the apex-level Intel International Science and Engineering Fair scheduled to be held in Pittsburgh, USA this summer (May). The miraculous transformation of these students of village government schools — which its well-documented, lack basic infrastructure, suffer chronic teacher truancy, multi-grade classrooms and abysmal learning outcomes — into winners of the highly competitive IRIS is the handiwork of the Agastya International Foundation (Agastya, estb. 1999), a Bangalore-based NGO which has constructed a unique, state-of-the-art science education centre for rural children on a 172-acre campus in Gudivanka village, Kuppam Mandal, Andhra Pradesh. Over the past 13 years since it was promoted by a group of educationists and scientists led by Ramji Raghavan (a former investment banker), Agastya (budget: Rs.12 crore in 2010-11) has reached 5 million children and 150,000 teachers (mainly from rural government schools) in ten states countrywide. Every day, in a rare feat of organisational efficiency and management, 259 Agastya teacher-instructors disseminate hands-on science education to over 4,800 children from government schools in ten states through its major science centre in Kuppam, 28 satellite science centres, 61 mobile science vans, and science fairs. In the process, Agastya has engineered a scalable model for sparking a belated science education revolution in rural India. The objective of Agastya is to arouse the latent curiosity of econo-mically disadvantaged rural children through hands-on science education. We want to enable them to become tinkerers, solution-seekers and problem-solvers anchored in and connected with their rural societies. This is best done by enabling them to access hands-on, experiential science laboratories to learn cause-effect thinking. Its very satis-fying that since we…