Mansukhbhai Kothari National School
H & M Royal, Sr.# 19, opp. Talab Factory, Kondhwa, Pune, Maharashtra 411048, India
http://www.mknspune.com/
Mansukhbhai Kothari National School (MKNS) is a secular, English-medium, co-educational day-boarding institution founded in 2004 by the Mansukhbhai Kothari Memorial Trust and located on the fast-developing north-east corridor of Pune. Thirty eight kilometres from the airport—and only nine kilometres from the Nashik PHATA—its five-hectare campus is landscaped in natural tiers, overlooking the Bhima river basin and surrounded on three sides by protected forested hills. These surroundings give every child daily contact with hills, flora, birdsong and wind, yet the school remains inside the Pune Metropolitan Region and is supplied with a ring main fibre connection, solar grid, and harvested rain-water lake.
The Lexington Education Corporation of Boston was invited by the Trustees to design the curriculum, governance and teacher-training model; accordingly MKNS combines India’s Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) with Cambridge Lower Secondary and the University of Cambridge A-&-AS-level. A student may exit Grade X with CBSE, or Grade XII with A-Levels, or keep both strands. Core academics are protected by maximum student-teacher ratios of 1 : 16 and a timetable that spans 8.30 a.m. to 5.00 p.m.—with mandatory “non-academic hours” for sport, performing arts, robotics, and Happiness Curriculum drawn from Bhutanese practices. Boarding is offered from Grade V onward (216 capacity); students and staff dine together vegetarian menus developed by the Trojan Sports Nutrition Lab at Loughborough University.
Facilities include a 25 m × 12 m half-Olympic swimming pool, NBA-size 3-layer wooden basketball court, two FIH-certified astro-turf hockey pitches, a FIFA-size football ground adapted from Portsmouth FC design, a 700-seat Théâtre d’Arts acoustically modelled on the Esplanade Studio, and separate science, applied-technology and design studios built around design-thinking cycles. A one-acre “Heritage Spice Valley” dedicates 82 plant species mentioned in the Atharva Veda; botany from Grade III onward is carried out here. Every classroom is fitted with writable glass walls, 3-D printers and locally designed green operable louvres that keep ambient noise below 45 dB in full swing.
Pastoral care is institutionalised: every learner is groomed by a Learning Mentor, a House Tutor, a Sports Captain and a Residential Medical Officer. Psychological services are led by a visiting Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist from Sassoon Hospital; EQ is tracked three times a year using Yale’s RULER programme. Over 40% of faculty hold international qualifications (IB/Cambridge PGCE), and all teachers undergo 96 hours of certified professional development per annum, co-ordinated with the United World College network in Singapore.
Graduating classes average 750–800 in SAT, 92 % in CBSE, and 60 % at A-Levels with 3 A* or better. College placements range from NID and IITs to Imperial College London, NYU Abu Dhabi and HKUST. Scholarships cover up to 100 % of fees for children from Tier-III city municipal schools and Army wards, ensuring the composition today is 38 % first-generation learners.
MKNS therefore offers a rare synthesis of Himalayan calm and cosmopolitan academics, rooted in Indian ethos yet globally networked.
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- Published: August 12, 2025
