About Us

The Unique Foundation, Pune aims at making responsible and constructive interventions in the socio-political domain through research, education, and training. It has been working with a purpose of stimulating debate and deliberation on the pressing issues of our times. With that purpose in mind, it has undertaken several activities, including facilitation of research projects on electoral and political process; policy process; and issues such as agriculture, drought, water, labour, migration and other rural issues; political economy of rural Maharashtra; as well as political thought and ideologies. The Foundation has given priority to raising issues of labourers and weaker sections, through its research on sugar-cutting labourers, reverse migration of workers during the Covid-19 lockdown period, and the plight of rural Maharashtra under Covid-19 lockdown etc. Studying and analyzing elections and compiling information on political elites is also one of the key areas of the Foundation’s work. With ‘Policy Research’ as its focus, the Foundation has carried out research projects, with the aim of delineating the politics embedded in the policy process on the one hand and scrutinizing the design and implementation of governmental policies/schemes/programs in order to make recommendations for their better implementation, on the other. Though centred around the state of Maharashtra for the time being, the Foundation has ambitions to undertake national research projects in the near future. Another integral part of the Foundation’s activities is publication of books on relevant socio-political and economic issues. We are also keen on organizing debates, panel discussions, lecture-series on the topics of contemporary relevance. The Foundation also endeavours to inquire into existing constructs, concepts and assumptions of knowledge and is committed towards the evolution of a critical epistemological approach. To overcome the limitations of the existing curriculum, it plans to design innovative, content-driven and substantive short-term courses as a contribution to the education sector. There is a dire need of increasing the interface between academicians and policy experts on the one hand and political/administrative actors and journalists on the other, regarding the understanding of political, ideological and policy issues. The Foundation intends to bridge the gap through dissemination of relevant material as well as training of political party activists, leaders, bureaucrats and journalists.