To promote competition , the newspapers of India formed United News of India (UNI) in March 1961.The history of its development is interesting. In the year 1959 it got registered as a company and started functioning from March 21, 1961. Since the year 1968, the agency has expanded its communication network and emerged as one of the largest news agency in the developing countries .

What is worth mentioning is its teleprinting network. It is reaching about 1100 subscribers by teleprinters. Its head office is located in New Delhi. It employs approximately 325 journalists around India.

UNI also has started operating globally. Infact it became the first Indian news agency to serve subscribers abroad in 1981. It is providing the wire service directly to their subscribers in the Arab Gulf states and in Singapore through an exclusive satellite channel. Around 250 stringers cover news events in other parts of the world . To suppliment agency news coverage of foreign countries , UNI have got their own correspondents who are working diligently in various countries like Washington, London, Dubai, Islamabad, Dhaka, Colombo, Kathmandu, Singapore and Sydney. Nepal was the first country where UNI posted a correspondent in the year 1968.

For UNI foreign news comes mainly from the Associated Press of America. Another foreign collaborator of UNI is DPA. Besides UNI also collaborates with 15 other wire services especially in the Gulf region.

Its remarkable achievement is that UNI`s service can be currently available in three languages: English, Hindi and Urdu. On May 1, 1982 The Hindi language service, "UNIVARTA", was launched and in June, 1992 the Urdu service was strated . Today , being the biggest and most comprehensive service of its kind in the country it dominates the news columns of Hindi newspapers in all Hindi speaking states and also in places like Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Kolkata. In the last fifteen years , nearly 250 newspapers published from more than sixty centres in Hindi heartland began subscribing to UNIVARTA. More than 100 newspapers depend exclusively on it. Still efforts are going on to fortify and expand UNIVARTA`s coverage, particularly in the eastern, western and southern parts of India.

As far as the content is concerned , it provides spot news and also news features on a wide variety of topics, including Art and Culture, Science, Agriculture, Economy, Heritage and India`s neighbors. These have proved to be extremely popular with UNIVARTA subscribers.

UNI is said to be the first news agency in India to launch a Finance service, a Stock Exchange service and a National Photo service.There are other services started by UNI for its subscribers both in India and abroad are as follows:

UNISCAN- a news service fed directly to the television sets
UNIDARSHAN - a TV wing to provide news features, news clips and documentaries to Doordarshan.
UNISCAN -News display on TV sets for hotels, and government or corporate clients
UNIDirect - Services for executives in government, corporate and other sectors.
UNI GRAPHICS - Ready-to-use computer-designed graphics