SC students must get scholarship: Commission

The Uttarakhand Right to Service Commission today recommended granting scholarships to eligible SC students of polytechnic who have been denied benefits of the scheme during 2015-16 on technical grounds.
Chief Commissioner of Right to Service Commission Alok Kumar Jain wrote to the Social Welfare Department recommending to it that scholarships be granted to all deserving SC students of polytechnic whose applications were rejected as their documents did not show online due to a software fault.
If hard copies of the applications and required documents were made available by the students to the department which had enough funds for the purpose, it was unfair and unjust to deny them the benefits just because of a fault in the software, Jain said.

The Commission made the recommendation after hearing the case of Vipin Kumar, a SC student of KL Polytechnic, Roorkee who had been denied scholarship and a similar case of one Rajan Verma of Haridwar who had said that out of a total of 330 scholarship applications submitted during 2915-16 only 5 were cleared.
The social welfare department had submitted during the hearing that most of the applications were rejected as documents of a majority of applicants did not show online on the department's website.
As the scholarship scheme is meant for the weaker sections which lack computer literacy and it was the first year when online applications were being invited by the department it was wholly unfair to deny the benefit of scholarship to eligible beneficiaries on grounds of a software fault, Jain observed during the hearing.