About

Born at Cuttack in Odisha, Ms. Poly Patnaik is the eldest of four siblings. She completed her schooling from Sunabeda HAL VSV School in Koraput in 1979 and moved to Bhubaneswar to study humanities at BJB College.After this, she did her post-graduation in teacher’s training from State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) in Bhubaneswar from 1981 to 1985. On 20 June 1992, Ms. Patnaik started her school Prakrit while she was still working as a teacher. It was run out of cottages near her house at Tank Pani Road. “I didn’t have the money to construct a building so I built cottages and started my school & it was the first day care school in the city, where students were provided with food and transportation along with studies,” says Ms Patnaik. The school was spread over 10,000 sqft for which she invested Rs 30,000 from her savings. Back in those days, the government was offering free land to educational institutions to set up schools and they got one-acre land in Unit-1 in Bhubaneswar in 1995 where the current school is located. In 2015, Mother’s Public School opened its first branch in Puri. The edupreneur had received the National Award for Teachers from the former President Pranab Mukherjee in 2012.Today, Mother’s Public School is ranked among the best schools in Bhubaneswar. It has a great academic record with cent per cent results year on year. A word of advice from Ms. Poly Patnaik : “A women can do anything. She doesn’t have to depend on her husband, or any man, for money – she just has to work passionately and the money will simply follow.”