Beyond STEM: Green Shoots Emerge With The Agastya Foundation’s New Initiative On Financial Literacy

In 1999, when the Agastya International Foundation set out to bring hands-on learning to disadvantaged children, their focus on STEM was not entirely by design. Founder Ramji Raghavan had envisioned a world-class educational movement that found tremendous support from some of the nation’s most brilliant scientific minds, including Dr. PK Iyengar, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, Dr. VK Aatre and Dr. R Krishnan.

Agastya’s learning model soon expanded to music, dance, fine arts and design-thinking, to encourage intelligences of every kind. Today, it is the world’s largest creativity laboratory, with a curiosity-driven experiential learning model that takes children on a journey of “Aah! Aha! HaHa!”, and nurtures the creative spirit in nearly 8 million children across the country each year.

It took a perceptive high schooler to question why Economics and Financial Literacy were not part of Agastya’s curriculum. Visiting Agastya’s campus in Gudipalle, Andhra Pradesh in August 2023, Yavisht Sethi – then a 9th grader at Bangalore’s Inventure Academy - was convinced that financial hygiene was essential.

The Government’s NCFE FEPA Programme, launched in 2019, aims to raise financial awareness among adults; however, no programmes introduce these basic concepts to younger children, unaware of financial tools that could help or scams that could dupe them. The immense success of UPI in India has seen QR code scams triple over the last three years, making the lack of financial literacy a key issue, especially in rural areas.

Struck by Yavisht’s insight, Agastya encouraged him to develop a curriculum for younger children. In June 2024, he accompanied Chayya Devi, Agastya’s Senior Manager of Programmes and her team, conducting campus workshops to test the curriculum with children in Classes 7 and 8. The workshops included introductions to demand and supply, interest rates and insurance, and games allowing children to buy goods with play money, and compare investment avenues like savings accounts or chit funds.

“The children were excited, especially by the investing game,” Chayya beamed. “Many knew about chit fund scams – so there was some awareness of the pitfalls. They found insurance boring, but learning that it could be used to protect them from crop failure or the death of cattle made them more engaged”.

The success of the workshops encouraged Yavisht to suggest launching a pilot programme in 10 schools, but the costs of using Agastya’s mobile labs and instructors, and the creation of hands-on materials was Rs. 5,00,000. Yavisht approached Agastya board member and long-time donor Alok Oberoi for support.

Oberoi instantly liked the idea. “Financial literacy is an absolute imperative and needs to be folded into what we do at Agastya. Else, we're sending kids off without something fundamentally valuable”, he states. With partial support from Oberoi, Yavisht crowd-sourced, sold scrap and approached parents of friends to raise the rest.

Shrishail Dharawade, Chief Experience Officer at Agastya, concurs, “I liked that it was initiated and driven by a student in the 10th grade, and saw immense potential for it to be included in Agastya’s maths programmes”. Together, Shrishail and Yavisht developed the framework of the Financial Literacy programme.

In August 2025, Agastya launched its first Financial Literacy Lab-on-a-Bike in Channapatna, near Bangalore. The Financial Literacy box - replete with mock currency, credit cards and cheque books, and a host of games and activities around budgeting, and wants-and-needs - was introduced to government school students.

Agastya’s trademark lab-on-a-bike delivery model has a reach of 1000 students across ten schools. In March 2026, a second mobile lab took the reach to 3000 students. Shrishail has earmarked Financial Literacy as one of the key initiatives for 2026, and now plans to expand it further.

Yavisht and his classmate Arya Ingale then approached the Navam Foundation, an offshoot of Agastya that makes televised content using Agastya’s models and beams it directly into government school classrooms via the Telangana government’s TSAT network, potentially reaching 5 million students.

The two high schoolers created scripts for modules on Financial Hygiene, Rising Prices, The Fundamentals of Money, Understanding the Markets and Everyday Economics, which were used to train college students in Telangana who would then record the content in Telugu at the TSAT studios.

By February 2026, the content had reached 1.5 million students, with the potential to reach 3.5 million more by mid-2026 - making it possibly the largest private financial literacy initiative in India. Additionally, in one of the largest surveys conducted across schools with a section on the Financial Literacy modules, Agastya received 6000 responses that provided valuable insights and feedback from the children. “Kids understood that saving was important, but when asked what they would do with Rs. 500, most said they would spend it immediately,” Yavisht describes. “Also, only about 30% were able to correctly identify a chit fund scam”.

Some of the feedback was especially encouraging. Over 90% of children said that they discussed the topics with their parents at home. Having seen Agastya children use design thinking skills to uplift their families, it was now clear that financial literacy too must be consciously infused into a child’s learning journey.

“I’ve seen cases of a vegetable vendor borrowing Rs.150 in the morning and agreeing to pay back Rs.200 in the evening,” says Navneet Munot, the head of HDFC AMC and a long time Agastya supporter. “All he knows is that he does not have Rs.150 in the morning and will most likely have Rs.200 in the evening. He is thinking in absolutes, whereas a finance person knows he’s paying an annualised interest rate of over 12000%! Even more shocking is microfinance loans and government schemes are available - people are just not aware”.

Such basic pitfalls make it essential to educate children on finance at an early age. “Understanding how money works either for or against you could prepare children much better for the world,” Yavisht underlines. “We take it for granted, but it needs to be instilled early, and Agastya is the perfect platform to do just that”.