Rama Prasad (Ramji) Raghavan

Raghavan was raised in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Calcutta. His father, K. V. Raghavan, was managing director of Alkali and Chemical Corporation of India and later chairman of Engineers India Limited and president of EID Parry; his maternal uncle was P. K. Iyengar, a former chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission. Both were founder trustees of the Agastya International Foundation.

He was educated at Rishi Valley School and graduated from Hans Raj College, University of Delhi. He holds an MBA from London Business School and a postgraduate diploma in development studies from the International Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands.

Raghavan worked as a consultant at A. F. Ferguson & Co. and then at Citibank in India, Puerto Rico and New York, before joining the Cedel Group in London as a director and member of its strategic advisory group.

In 1998 he left banking to found the Agastya International Foundation. Agastya's innovations have included mobile science laboratories, the lab-on-a-bike, and peer-to-peer learning through large science fairs. With support from the Government of Andhra Pradesh the foundation built a 172-acre campus creativity lab near Bangalore, housing more than fifteen experiential science, art and innovation centres, including the Ramanujan Math Park.

In 2007 Agastya signed an agreement with the investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala that helped it expand its outreach and build the campus, and in 2010 the Government of Karnataka signed a memorandum with the foundation to establish an ecosystem for hands-on science education in the state.

Raghavan has served on the Central Advisory Board of Education of the Government of India, as a board member of Vigyan Prasar, and on the working group on attracting children to science and mathematics of the Prime Minister's National Knowledge Commission. He is a member of the governing council of the Marico Innovation Foundation.

Raghavan was elected a senior fellow of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public in 2009. In 2011 he received the People's Hero award from the Coimbatore unit of the Confederation of Indian Industry.

Under his chairmanship Agastya won the Google Global Impact Award in 2013 and was ranked by the Rockefeller Foundation's NextCentury Awards among the top hundred global innovators. In 2016 he received the Deshpande Foundation's Sandbox Catalyst Award and the Innovation for India award of the Marico Innovation Foundation, and in 2017 the Rotary Club of Madras East Vocational Skilling Excellence Award.

In 2022 he was felicitated by Chelsea Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York, and in October 2024 he received the Making a Difference Award at the Children's Hope India gala in New York, together with a citation from the County of Nassau.[2][3][4][5]