We’re at the beginning of something. Deliberately.
Manuskey Foundation is a Section 8 non-profit working across two pillars — mental health and women’s empowerment — to make care, voice and leadership a shared foundation in India, not a private privilege. We are early-stage on purpose: building carefully, with the people we exist for, before we scale.
Our story
Manuskey means humanity.
The name is the anchor. Everything we build is a way of putting humanity back into systems that too often forget it — in classrooms, clinics, cultural spaces and community life.
The founding moment came in a letter. During Dr. Sharda’s work with the WHO, a seventeen-year-old girl from Odisha wrote in — a letter that named, in her own words, exactly the gap this work exists to close. That letter is why Manuskey exists.
Continuing a longer lineage
Manuskey also carries forward Savitrimai Phule Katta — founded twenty years ago by Sharda Nawle Bhagat as a community platform for women’s voice, dialogue and cultural expression. Dormant in recent years, its work — poetry gatherings, awareness songs, street plays, community education — now finds a renewed home inside Manuskey’s women’s empowerment pillar.
Directors & Team
Meet the founders.
Manuskey is co-led by a grassroots educator-activist and a public health practitioner — three and a half decades of community organising alongside a decade inside national policy.
Director · Community & Cultural Engagement
Sharda Nawle Bhagat
M.A. · B.Ed. · 35+ years in public education and community organising
Sharda Nawle Bhagat is a retired BMC educator, published poet, feminist writer and community organiser with over three and a half decades of practice across Maharashtra — through public education, awareness songs, street plays, poetry gatherings and community dialogue.
She is the author of Vartul Pusun Takatana and editor of Aabhal Peltana, and has been recognised with the Savitribai Fellowship Award and the Samajbhushan Award. She is also the Founder President of Savitrimai Phule Katta.
At Manuskey Foundation, she anchors community and cultural engagement — building the spaces where people can speak, heal, connect and lead with dignity.
Asia’s Rising Circle · Singapore, 2026
Director · Founder
Dr. Prachi Sharda
BDS · MPH (TISS Mumbai) · Public Health · National Policy · Youth Mental Health
Dr. Prachi Sharda has spent over a decade inside the systems she now works to change — moving between community, state and national policy tables, asking how the systems meant to catch a young person in distress actually catch them.
She coordinated Maharashtra’s District Mental Health Programme across 34 districts, led COVID-era mental health coordination at the state level, and served as a national advisor at the World Health Organization — contributing to NMHP 2.0, the scale-up of Tele-MANAS, and national suicide prevention guidelines.
In 2026, she founded Manuskey Foundation — the answer she wanted the system to have.
Team
Alongside the directors.
Vijaya Shekhar Salkar
Strategy & Operations Lead
Anchors strategy, operations and partnerships — turning intent into structure so the foundation can hold what it is building.
Monica Kapoor
Programme Lead · English Vinglish
Leads English Vinglish — the spoken-English programme for marginalised students and early-career professionals, designed as a wellbeing intervention as much as a language one.
Mission
Two pillars. One mission.
One million mental health literate by 2030.
Community-led literacy, youth engagement, first-aid networks and creative public awareness — a million more people in India who can recognise, respond to and speak about mental health with confidence.
Women’s voice, agency and leadership — restored.
Building the platforms, language classrooms and cultural spaces where women — especially those historically excluded by caste, class and geography — can name their reality, lead their communities, and shape the systems around them.
Vision
What we’re building toward.
Mental health as shared foundation, not private privilege.
A generation of young people worldwide who understand mental health, advocate for it, and build systems that leave no one behind.
A world where women are architects, not audience.
Communities where women’s leadership is ordinary — in households, panchayats, classrooms, cultural stages and policy rooms alike.