Ramji Raghavan
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Agastya International Foundation
Ramji Raghavan | |
|---|---|
| Education | MBA |
| Alma mater | London Business School International Institute of Social Studies University of Delhi |
| Occupations | Founder and Chairperson, Agastya International Foundation |
| Known for | Agastya International Foundation |
| Website | www |
Ramji Raghavan is a social innovator and entrepreneur. He is the founder and chairperson of Agastya International Foundation[1] Non Profit Organizations. Ramji served as a member of the Central Advisory Board of Education, Government of India. He is member of the Governing Council of the Marico Innovation Foundation [better source needed]. He has also served as a board member of Vigyan Prasar[2] and as a member of the Working Group on Attracting Children to Science and Math of the Prime Minister's National Knowledge Commission.[3] Ramji has spoken at Stanford, the Education World Forum,[4] the annual INK Conference in association with TED,[5] the Clinton Global Initiative, MIT Media Lab,[6] Peking University, Indian Institute of Science,[7] the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research[8] the PanIIT Conference,[9] the Confederation of Indian Industry, Deshpande Development Dialogue, the Indian Institute of Management – Bangalore,[10] the WISE Summit 2014, Qatar[11] and RAFT- Resource Area For Teaching, Bay Area, USA.[citation needed]
Ramji was raised in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Calcutta where his father KV Raghavan[12] served as Managing Director of the ICI Group company, Alkali and Chemical Corporation of India Limited and later as chairman of Engineers India Limited and president of EID Parry Limited.[13] Ramji's father and his maternal uncle, Dr. P. K. Iyengar, former chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission were founder trustees of Agastya International Foundation.[14] He was educated at the Rishi Valley School.[15] He holds an MBA from the London Business School and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Development Studies from The International Institute of Social Studies, The Netherlands. He graduated from Hans Raj College, University of Delhi.[16] Raghavan is married to Monica (née Sanghani), great great granddaughter of Devkaran Nanjee, the founder of Dena Bank.
Career
Raghavan was a consultant with A. F. Ferguson & Co., followed by Citibank in India, Puerto Rico and New York City. Later he worked with the Europe-based Cedel Group in London as director and member of the strategic advisory group.[17]
Social work
In 1998, Ramji left his commercial career in banking and finance to create Agastya International Foundation,[18] to provide science, math, art and design thinking education to over 30 million underprivileged children and 250,000 government school teachers across India.[19] During his tenure, Agastya has pioneered many educational innovations at scale, including mobile science labs, lab-on-a-bike and peer-to-peer learning via mega science fairs for underprivileged children. Agastya's 172-acre campus creativity lab houses over fifteen experiential science, art and innovation centers, including the Ramanujan Math Park.[citation needed] In the late 1980s, Ramji met Janaki Ammal, wife of the mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan in Triplicane, Madras. In a blog appearing in a TIFR journal,[20] Ramji mentions Mrs. Ramanujan telling him, "no one remembers my husband anymore". More than a decade later, a bust of Ramanujan was installed in the Agastya campus creativity lab. Agastya gifted identical busts to the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge University, the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, TIFR’s Institute of Applicable Mathematics, Bangalore, the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, MIT, and Stanford, USA. His daughter, Jeena Raghavan's painting of math genius Ramanujan, was purchased by Devesh Mody of Texas and gifted to Stanford. With support from the government of Andhra Pradesh, Ramji and his colleagues established a 172-acre campus creativity lab near Bangalore.[21] In 2007 Agastya signed a MoU with stock market investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, which helped Agastya to scale its outreach activity and build its creative campus.[22] In 2010 the Government of Karnataka signed a MoU with Agastya International Foundation to establish an ecosystem for hands-on science education in the state.[23] Wisdom of Agastya, an illustrated book authored by Vasant Nayak and Shay Taylor of the MurthyNayak Foundation[24] in Baltimore, USA, chronicles Ramji and his team's journey between 1999 and 2014 in building Agastya International Foundation.
In March 2021 Agastya announced the creation of Navam Innovation Foundation in partnership with the Pravaha Foundation of Hyderabad.