No scholarship backlog pending, says Javadekar

The government has made an expenditure of Rs 250 crore in the form of a "special grant" to disburse the amount of various pending scholarships and fellowships for which complaints were raised, Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar said on Wednesday.

The scholarship money will now be credited to the accounts of beneficiary students on the 30th of every month, he said.

"There used to be some complaints about some scholarships getting delayed. There were news about some scholarships' amount not being given for four months or five months.

"So, we reviewed the entire system. From last month, November, we started crediting scholarship amount by 30th of each month. As of now, there's no backlog," Javadekar told reporters here.

"To clear the backlog, the Ministry has incurred an expenditure of Rs 250 crore," he added.

The scholarships/ fellowships for which the amount was spent were those given by the University Grants Commission, AICTE, and the Ministry.

The cleared scholships include merit-cum-means scholarship, scholarship meant for Jammu and Kashmir students given by the AICTE, Ishan Uday scholarship meant for students from the north-eastern states and PG scholarship for single girls. They also included fellowships like JRF and GATE.

The Minister said that there are 2,44,000 beneficiaries for these scholarships for which Rs 4,000 crore is spent annually by the government.

In the month of November, complaints were raised by the Jawaharlal Nehru University students over non-disbursal of merit-cum-means scholarship amount, which they had said was pending for eight months and totalled over Rs 50 lakh.

--IANS

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