AICTE Grant for Organizing Conference(GOC)

Overview

About GOC

An institute pays for the whole conference first and asks AICTE for a third of it afterwards. The grant is released on a reimbursement basis, once the accounts have been audited and the closure file is in (GOC scheme document). The clause that quietly decides most proposals sits earlier in the same document: the application has to reach the council at least 8 months before the date of the conference, so a department that fixes its dates in March has already missed the money for a November event.

Grant for Organizing Conference, which AICTE shortens to GOC, is an institutional grant with no student route into it. The council's own key-points note sets the scale at 100 conferences in each of the two categories, across Science and Technology, Management and Hotel Management, and it names BBA, BCA and BMS institutions as eligible too (Key features of the GOC scheme).

Which category a proposal falls into is settled before a word goes into the portal, and it fixes the ceiling. Category A is reserved for themes AICTE announces itself, decided periodically by an expert committee. Category B is where an institute proposes its own subject, whether that is a core engineering discipline, management, hotel management, or work that sits across several fields at once. The scheme document keeps a running annexure of emerging areas for Category B and says plainly that it will be updated periodically, so an area absent from today's list is not permanently outside the scheme. BBA, BCA and BMS institutions carry a restriction that is easy to read past: they are eligible under Category B alone, so the lower of the two ceilings applies to them whatever theme they choose.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

Applications are invited round the year, so there is no open date and no close date on the record. A proposal is never late against a calendar here, only against its own conference: every deadline that binds is counted from the conference date or from the sanction letter.

The closure row is the one with a penalty attached to it. AICTE may withhold funds released to the institute under its other schemes if the project is not closed by submitting the documents after 30 days of the conference (scheme document), so a delayed closure file on one conference can hold up unrelated grants on the same campus.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The institute has one test to clear, and it is short: AICTE approval, plus at least 8 years of existence. Everything after that is about the two faculty members named on the proposal, and the heaviest test on them is a track record of running conferences rather than a designation. The coordinator needs three conferences already organised before proposing an international one, or one before proposing a national one. Rank and service sit underneath that requirement: full-time regular faculty at Associate Professor or Professor level, or a senior faculty member, with 10 years of teaching and research and publications behind them. The co-coordinator needs 7 years of teaching and research, plus one conference organised where the proposal is international (scheme document).

NBA accreditation of the organising department is written as a preference and not a bar, and the organisers are separately expected to hold in-house expertise in the subject field of the event, which is AICTE's way of ruling out a conference bought in from outside the campus. Backing from a professional body carries explicit weightage, and the same document asks for the collaboration letter from a body such as IEEE, ASME or ASCE, or from a reputed department, technical university, industry association or R&D lab, to be furnished along with the application rather than produced later.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

Three clauses end a GOC proposal outright, and none of them is filed under a heading that says so; they sit among the terms for institutions and the fund-utilization rules of the scheme document. An institute that has already taken a conference grant is out until two years have passed. An organisation filing more than two proposals in the same period may find the extras not entertained, with the committee taking that call on the quality of what came in. And a sanction is welded to the conference it names, so the money cannot be turned to another programme or another conference even where the theme is close.

The fourth bar is procedural, and it bites once the offer letter is already in hand. Prior approval of the council is needed for a change of programme, of coordinator, or of venue, failing which the offer already issued is treated as automatically withdrawn. The one variable AICTE has since released is the date: an addendum to the scheme lets the institution hold the conference within twelve months of the sanction or offer letter at its own convenience, with prior intimation to AICTE, so dates can move inside that window while the venue and the coordinator cannot.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

A GOC sanction is finished the moment the reimbursement is paid, so nothing about it comes up for renewal: one approved conference, one closure file, one payment, with no continuation year and no second instalment behind it. What stands in for renewal is a queue. The scheme document makes an institute eligible for a conference grant once in two years, which turns GOC into something a department plans around rather than budgets for every session.

What you get

Award & benefits

Both categories are funded at the same fraction of what the conference actually costs. The only thing the category changes is the cap.

The scheme adds two provisions that take some of the sting out of paying last. The scheme document puts the offer letter itself to work, allowing an institute to use it to raise funds from other sponsors, which makes an AICTE sanction a bargaining chip with industry partners months before AICTE pays anything. It also lets 10% of the sanctioned amount go towards the registration fee of participants from the SC and ST categories, and the addendum widened that concession to cover participants from the SC/ST, PwD and EWS categories.

• Financial Assistance
• Category A Conferences
• Financial assistance equal to one-third of the total conference expenditure.
• Maximum assistance up to ₹3,00,000.
• Applicable for conferences organized in AICTE pre-defined themes.
• Category B Conferences
• Financial assistance equal to one-third of the total conference expenditure.
• Maximum assistance up to ₹2,00,000.
• Applicable for conferences in: Core engineering and technical disciplines
• Management and hotel management
• Multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, and trans-disciplinary areas
• The conference duration should be at least 2 days.
• At least 3 eminent experts should participate as keynote speakers.
• At least 15% participants should be from other states.
• Papers from host institution should not exceed 10% of total papers.
• The approved conference should be conducted within 12 months from sanction.
• The institution can receive grant only once in 2 years.
• AICTE logo must be displayed in all conference materials and venue displays.
• Funds cannot be utilized for any purpose other than the approved conference.
• Mode of Disbursement
• Reimbursement basis after successful completion of conference.
• Released to the institution after submission and verification of required documents.
• One-time assistance per approved conference.
• The sanctioned conference must be conducted within 12 months from sanction letter.

What to prepare

Documents required

Nothing is uploaded in one go. Two forms belong to the application itself, another falls due within days of the sanction, and a third set is what finally releases the money after the delegates have gone home.

At the application stage the portal wants two forms downloaded from the scheme screen and uploaded back as scanned PDFs of up to 10 MB each: a verified bank Mandate Form, attached before the application record can be filled, and the GOC Declaration Certificate, attached inside it (GOC user manual). The account behind that mandate form is prescribed too. It has to be a savings account and the holder's name cannot be a personal one, and confirming those rows is irreversible in the session, because the institute and bank blocks go read-only the moment the confirmation is accepted.

The sanction triggers the second document. AICTE prints the acceptance letter as a proforma with blanks for the sanction letter number, the amount received, the conference title, the dates and the venue, returned over the signatures and seals of both the coordinator and the head of the institute. After the event, the closure set is what releases the money, and the arithmetic is visible in the proformas themselves: the statement of expenditure has a line for the total expenditure, a line for one third of it, and a line for the grant received, signed by the coordinator, the head of the institution and either a chartered accountant or the finance officer depending on whether the institute is private or government aided. The utilization certificate is a separate sheet again, and it accounts for three amounts rather than one: the grant sanctioned, any unspent balance brought forward, and the interest that balance earned.

Step by step

How to apply

GOC never touches a scholarship portal. The file lives inside the institute's own AICTE login from creation to closure, and the GOC user manual puts three steps between the AICTE home page and an empty GOC record: Web Portal Login, the AICTE Quality Improvement Schemes icon, then All AQIS Application Information, where a new record is created and GOC picked out of the AQIS schemes dropdown. The mandate form is uploaded there, the details of earlier grants sanctioned to the institute are entered, and the bank details are confirmed before the application proper opens.

What follows is a long form, and most of it is evidence rather than description. Beyond the conference details, it asks for the coordinator and co-coordinator to be picked from the institute's own faculty list by faculty ID, then for their credentials parameter by parameter, then for the institution's credentials, the keynote speakers, a written justification covering objectives, relevance, benefits to faculty and students and the expected academic and research impact, the foreign participants and invited speakers, any financial commitment from other agencies, and a budget broken down by head of expenditure with a justification against each. Minimum 5 keywords related to the conference theme are required before the form can go in, and a Validate application button has to return the message that validation for the GOC scheme completed successfully before the Submit button is used.

An international conference carries a second approval track that has nothing to do with the grant. Proposals for a no objection certificate for an international conference by a private technical institution are submitted to AICTE, which examines them and forwards them to the Ministry of Education for the NOC (MoE guidelines annexed to the scheme). Separately, organisers must approach the Ministry of Home Affairs through its online event clearance platform at conference.mha.gov.in for security clearance in two situations only: where a participant is from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq or Sudan, is a foreigner of Pakistani origin or a stateless person, or where participants will visit restricted or protected areas, Jammu and Kashmir, or the North Eastern states other than Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland.

Status is the one thing the scheme never publishes. GOC has no National Scholarship Portal record, and the user manual ends at the Submit button without documenting a status field at all. What an institute holds afterwards is its AQIS Application ID and the row under All AQIS Application Information inside its own portal account. Everything myScheme adds is negative: beneficiary an institution, mode online through aicte-india.org, the DBT field left blank. The next real signal arrives from outside the portal, as the offer letter AICTE sends the institution once the council approves the proposal. Payment then follows the closure file rather than the calendar, since disbursement is on reimbursement after the conference and after the uploaded documents are verified, into the account the mandate form fixed at the start.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Nothing is decided the week it arrives. The scheme document holds applications and takes up every two months' worth as a single lot, which is then scrutinised at the council, put to an expert committee, and settled by the council on the experts' recommendations together with the funds available for the scheme. The offer letter follows that decision. Two things fall out of the design: a proposal competes against whichever batch it lands in rather than against a fixed bar, and an application that clears every eligibility test can still fail on the money left in the cycle.

Read the form's credential blocks and it is clear what a proposal is expected to prove. The coordinator's block takes research experience in years, papers published in national and international journals in the last 3 years, PhD students guided, conferences organised, professional body memberships, awards, patents registered and prior experience of running programmes funded by AICTE or other agencies. The institution's section runs to years of establishment, courses accredited, whether the course under which the proposal is submitted is NBA accredited, whether the conference is at PG level, whether it is being organised with a technical society, a reputed institute or laboratory, or industry, and how many conferences the institute has already conducted in the last 3 years (GOC user manual). Each of those is a count field with a box of its own, and leaving the boxes empty is itself an answer.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

GOC splits its conditions between two signatures, and the coordinator's set is the one people underestimate. That person has to keep an electronic record of the papers, the participants, their institutions and their locations and share it with AICTE, which is how the council verifies the pan-India participation and overseas presence it asks for. The conference needs its own web page on the institute's website. And the academic background of the coordinator, the co-coordinator and the paper presenters must be in conformity with the theme of the proposed conference (scheme document).

The institution's set is about visibility, written as obligation rather than courtesy: a link to AICTE's funding schemes on the institute's own website and on the conference page, the AICTE logo wherever the conference is displayed online, the same logo on publicity material, advertisements, brochures, invitation cards and any other collateral, and the logo again on the stage backdrop or podium at the venue. A cancelled conference has to be reported to AICTE at once. Monitoring is one line in the document with a large consequence behind it: AICTE may send an officer or observer to the conference itself, to see the quality of it and collect feedback at the venue, so the report the institute files later is not the only account the council holds.

Get help

Contact

AICTE prints an addressee for GOC but not an inbox. The acceptance letter proforma is headed to the Head, Institutional Development Cell, AICTE, New Delhi-110070, and that desk is where the scheme's paper goes. What the GOC papers never supply is a way to ask a question ahead of filing: no phone number and no email address is attached to the scheme in any of them. The nearest published line is the letterhead of the scheme circular dated 7 January 2026, which carries 011-29581399 and ms@aicte-india.org over the signature of Member Secretary Prof. Shyama Rath, at the council's Nelson Mandela Marg office in Vasant Kunj.

Source

Official links

Frequently asked questions

From the official scheme FAQ (myScheme)

Read this

Disclaimer

Disclaimer

Scheme details are compiled from myScheme, the Government of India’s official scheme-discovery platform, and are reproduced without alteration. Amounts, deadlines and eligibility change between cycles, so always confirm on the official links above before applying. Expertie does not process applications or charge fees.

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