Are we teaching children what to think, or how to think? When our children focus on rote learning and exam-based academic progress, how do we nurture the inventive Indian who can fuel the imagination of the world with creativity, critical thinking and problem-solving? What if classrooms became labs of imagination, not factories of repetition?

These are the questions that the Agastya International Foundation set out to answer 25 years ago, by designing a curiosity-driven, experiential learning model that has transformed education across India. Today, their vision of sparking curiosity, nurturing creativity and instilling confidence and caring has impacted over 25 million schoolchildren and 300,000 teachers in government schools across 23 Indian States.

An acclaimed new book from Penguin Random House, The Moving of Mountains traces Agastya's extraordinary journey in reshaping the classroom by replacing rote learning with hands-on experiments, creative projects and interactive models in science, art and ecology.

Join us in a discussion of why this powerful vision for curiosity-driven, experiential learning is critical to the future of India, and has caught the imagination of scientists, industry leaders, educationists and policy makers alike.

In this episode of BIC Talks, Adhirath Sethi, Revathi Narayanan, K VijayRaghavan and G K Ananthsuresh will be in conversation with Vikram Bhat. This is an excerpt from a conversation that took place in the BIC premises in Aug 2025.

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