Mission

PUKAR is an innovative and experimental initiative that aims to contribute to a global debate about urbanization and globalization.

Goals

The goal of PUKAR is to create a world class incubator for knowledge, debate and innovation about cities and globalization. It takes Mumbai as its conceptual base and laboratory for cross-disciplinary research projects which can create new urban knowledge, thus enhancing circulation of ideas and concepts between the local and the global.

PUKAR aims to democratize research and broaden access to knowledge among disenfranchised or weakly institutionalized groups and to create a space from which their non traditional and non expert knowledge can contribute to local, national and global debates about their own futures. It promotes research as a right for everyone inside and outside of the formal educational system and uses research as a tool for pedagogy, advocacy, transformation and intervention. PUKAR is designed to complement, on the social and cultural side, the current growth in technology driven knowledge initiative in India.

PUKAR regards knowledge, action and research as interactive and recursive processes. Knowledge involves documentation and intervention. Action, in this perspective, involves exploration and innovation. Research, not simply a prerogative of the academic world, is a disciplined means of acquiring new knowledge. PUKAR seeks to reinvent the terms of the relationship between knowledge, action and research.

PUKAR, an independent knowledge production centre and a research collective serves as a convener for debates and conferences, an executor for targeted research work and a disseminator through debate oriented white papers, discourses, and internet based reports. It works though the following means to achieve these goals:

• Cross Knowledge
  
  Encourage entrepreneurs, scholars, policy makers, activists, cultural and social analysts, urban planners, researchers and technical experts to brainstorm outside the constraints of a single institution, constituency or a project to identify new ways to think about urban challenges.
   
• Partnerships
  
  The centre draws on partners from the world of urban activism, academic sector, policy makers from public and private sector, in all its activities (initiation, execution, dissemination and evaluation).
   
• Learning Lab
  
  The centre is set so that it can serve as a resource centre as well as learning lab for other organizations, institutions, both public and private, with similar aims.