India Child Education - Visiting Agastya Headquarters in Bengaluru

(Sorry for the late post. We had some technical difficulty with the blog! This blog documents the first two days in Bengaluru.)

We arrived at Bengaluru early morning and checked into the beautiful Elanza hotel. After a quick nap and a delicious breakfast, we arrived at Agastya’s headquarters to meet with Mr. Thiagu, the COO of Agastya, and Mr. Laxminarayan, Agastya’s supply chain lead. Joining us by video was the team from Agastya’s campus including Mr. Nitin, the head of the campus.

Meeting with Mr. Thiagu and Mr. Laxminarayan

Gabrielle, Xi Xi, and Inseong took the lead in asking about Agastya’s mission, current operations, educational philosophy, and impact assessment. We learned that Agastya uses three methods for assessing their impact: testing, anecdotes, and questionnaires gauging confidence and competence. Many of the questionnaires and surveys are created by the Indian School of Management, although they are not directly involved in collecting the data or writing the reports. Mr. Thiagu says that Agastya aims to transform students’ ways of thinking, encouraging systems thinking.

We also wanted to know more about the challenges in the Indian educational system. We learned that absence rate has decreased significantly in the past decade, and financial reasons are no longer a major contributing cause to absences among students. However, we also learned that teacher absence is still a challenge and a sensitive subject.

In terms of prototyping the local manufacturing process, we worked with Mr. Laxminarayan to source all the materials that we need. In particular, Mr. Laxminarayan is finding Indian sources for our solar panels, batteries, and lift-off hinges. We transferred over the mechanical and electronic design files, as well as our bill of materials, with the hopes that under his expert eye, we may be able to find cheaper or more appropriate components for our Indian manufactured BrightBoxes.

With our questions about Agastya answered, and having equipped Mr. Laxminarayan to help us with manufacturing, we closed the meeting and took a taxi to lunch. We spent some time exploring the exciting city of Bengaluru and celebrated New Year together as the best ADE team, ever. NBD.

Happy birthday Nick!