AICTE - Scheme For Promoting Interests, Creativity And Ethics Among Students(AICTE - SPICES)

Overview

About AICTE - SPICES

Read the name and SPICES sounds like a student award. It is not. AICTE's scheme document puts the grant at Rs 1 lakh to an institute, and the council's own FAQ says the money can only be released in favour of the Director, Principal or Registrar of the institution, never in a coordinator's name and never in a student's. What a student gets out of it is real, but it arrives as club activity, not as a bank transfer.

SPICES buys one thing: a year of properly funded activity for a single student club, chapter or society at an AICTE approved college. AICTE lists it among its institutional development schemes, alongside MODROB and the Grant for Organising Conference, and the AQIS financial-support calendar files it under Schemes for Institutes with one word in its who-may-apply column: Institute.

The design is a match, not a handout. AICTE puts in Rs 1 lakh and the college has to put in at least as much, so the smallest SPICES project is a Rs 2 lakh pot spent on one club over one year. The council picks a club that is already working and turns it into a demonstration piece: the scheme document says the funded club should serve as a model for other clubs in the institution and in other institutions, and the FAQ is blunt that AICTE expects the college to start funding its remaining clubs the same way afterwards.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

SPICES has no standing annual deadline to quote, which is why the blank open and close fields on its scheme record are correct rather than missing: a round exists only when AICTE advertises one. The scheme document says applications are invited every year at the beginning of the academic session, in July or August. Practice has drifted from that. The advertisement for the academic year 2021-22 asked institutions to apply between 1st February and 28th February, 2022, and AICTE's notification then extended the last date to 07th March 2022.

Three later SPICES entries sit on AICTE's own bulletin board, all of them from 2022: the advertisement for the financial year 2022-2023 posted on August 13, 2022, a further SPICES advertisement on August 25, 2022, and an announcement extending the submission window on October 4, 2022. AICTE's site search turns up no SPICES bulletin after that, and the attachments on those 2022 pages are no longer being served.

Nothing here says a round is open today, and no institute should treat it that way. The dates that bind live inside a current advertisement on the bulletins page, and the proposal itself is filed from the AQIS screen in the institute's own AICTE login, so a college that wants the grant reads the bulletins from July rather than working back from the February window of 2022.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

A SPICES proposal is filed by the institution, never by the club and never by a student. The scheme document's eligibility clause runs from (a) to (f), and every item in it is read against the institution and the single club it nominates.

Three points sit outside that table. The coordinator's academic background has to be in conformity with the theme of the club, so a mechanical engineering professor fronting a literary society is a weak filing. Experience of organising events and co-curricular activities is listed as desirable rather than mandatory for both the coordinator and the co-coordinator, which is where a nominally qualified pair with no event history loses ground. And the club need not be technical at all: AICTE's FAQ confirms that a club from any discipline, theme or stream in an approved institution may be proposed, and that student chapters and societies are eligible on the same footing as an in-house club.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

The hard bar is repetition. AICTE's notification for the 2021-22 round states it in one line: institutions which are already beneficiary are not eligible. A college that took the grant for its robotics club cannot come back next year for its debating society.

Inside a funded project, four heads of spending are ruled out. The grant cannot buy hardware or software, which must come from institute funds if the club needs it. It cannot meet any expense relating to the faculty coordinator, co-coordinator or any other faculty member. It cannot pay for a visit to an industrial or technical hub, which AICTE treats as departmental academic work. And it cannot be moved to another club, however deserving, once the offer letter names the funded one. Activities held before the offer letter arrived are not admissible either, so a college cannot backdate a festival it had already run.

Membership is restricted too: ex-students, ex-faculty and other officials of the institute may not be members of the club.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

SPICES has no second year and no renewal form. The scheme document ends an institute's eligibility at one grant, so the funded club cannot be topped up for another year and no other club at the same college can be put up later. The project itself runs for one year from the date of the offer or sanction letter, and it closes when the institute files the project report and the original bills, in soft copy and in hard copy.

What you get

Award & benefits

AICTE's share is Rs 1 lakh and the institute's committed share is a minimum of Rs 1 lakh, which is how the FAQ arrives at a floor of Rs 2 lakh for the whole project. The same answer carries a clause worth reading before a club underspends: if the expenditure inside the project duration comes to less than Rs 2 lakh, AICTE's grant is reduced to 50% of the actual expenses accrued on club activities.

How the pooled money may be split is fixed rather than advisory.

The scheme document states that ceiling against the grant rather than against the pool, allowing registration and travel together up to 40% of the total grant, and the FAQ adds that any travel spending above the cap is borne by the institute.

One point of disbursement needs care, because AICTE's own papers moved. The scheme document dated August 2020 describes the Rs 1 lakh as an advance, released once the institute submits verifiable proof of its committed contribution within 15 days of the sanction letter. The FAQ, answering institutes sanctioned in 2021-22, says the institute will be reimbursed the Rs 1 lakh once the project is completed and not before one year. The same FAQ dates the switch from the other end: for the 2020-2021 batch the project clock starts on the date the funds are received, while for institutes sanctioned in 2021-2022 it starts on the date of the offer letter. So the advance wording still carried in the scheme record is the 2020 position, the reimbursement answer is the later one, and the document that settles which applies to a given college is that college's own offer letter.

• Limit of Funding: ₹ 1,00,000 only (one-time grant to one institute)
• Disbursement of the Funds: ₹ 1,00,000 as advance
• Programs/ Activities targeted in the Clubs: Evolution of Interests/Hobbies, Creativity/ Imagination/ Innovation, and Ethics/ Value through a range of student activities.

What to prepare

Documents required

Almost nothing is asked at the application stage beyond bank paperwork. The user manual requires the institute's bank details to be confirmed on the AQIS screen, warns that the account must be a savings account and that the account holder's name must not be a personal name, and asks for the verified bank mandate form as a scanned PDF of up to 10 MB. Once bank details are confirmed they become read-only.

The heavy paperwork lands at the end of the year. On the portal the institute uploads photographs of the club's events, feedback from club members, a performance report, and a two-minute video that has to contain four specific things: the coordinator introducing the institute by name and state, the club's activities and achievements, how the club benefited students and the institute, and an acknowledgement of AICTE's support. Separately, the institute submits a utilisation certificate and statement of accounts in the prescribed proforma, audited by its finance or accounts officer, along with supporting bills attested by the head of the institution and a statement of the amount the institution itself made available. Bills must carry GST numbers, though AICTE prescribes no format for them and accepts online invoices for anything that is not hardware or software.

An unspent balance is returned rather than retained. The FAQ answers this for the 2020-2021 project batch: the amount goes back immediately by NEFT or a crossed demand draft in favour of Member Secretary, AICTE, payable at New Delhi, within 30 days of the approved project completion date. No separate refund rule for the later batches appears in the scheme papers, which is a question for the offer letter rather than an assumption to make.

Step by step

How to apply

The filing runs entirely inside AICTE's institute login, under AQIS, and the sequence in the user manual is strict. The institute logs in through Web Portal Login, opens AICTE Quality Improvement Schemes, checks and saves its institute and bank details, downloads and re-uploads the mandate form under AQIS Document Attachment, then creates a new AQIS application and selects SPICES from the schemes dropdown.

The form itself is where a proposal is won or lost, because it is built as a scoring sheet in five parts rather than as a narrative application.

The application is then validated on the same screen and submitted only after the validation message clears. Until it is submitted it sits under All AQIS Application Information in the same login, which is the screen an institute reopens to finish a section.

Tracking a live project. After submission, tracking moves to a second system, the SPICES Review Portal, and the sequence there trips up new coordinators. The FAQ requires the acceptance letter to be uploaded on the review portal within 7 days of the offer letter reaching the institute, with a hard copy posted to AICTE as well. Event details are then uploaded through the year as activities happen. The Review Submit button is pressed once, at the very end, because clicking it locks the portal and nothing further can be uploaded. If both the coordinator and co-coordinator move on, the institute files a Request for Change of Coordinator on the same portal, with documents signed by the head of the institution.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Four stages sit between a submitted proposal and a sanction letter: screening and scrutiny at the council, evaluation by an expert, a decision by the council that weighs the expert's recommendation against the funds available for the scheme, and the issue of the sanction letter to the institution. Grant release then waits on the institute proving it has actually put its own committed money into the club.

AICTE has published what makes a proposal strong: past achievements of the club, its interface with industry or a professional body, the achievements of the faculty coordinator, and the credentials of the institute. That maps directly onto the form's five sections, which is why a club with a bank account, bye-laws, a documented event history and an industry tie-up files a materially better proposal than one assembled the week the advertisement appears.

One line in the processing methodology is easy to miss and worth using: the scheme document says the sanction letter itself can be used by the institute to raise funds from other sponsors.

The guidelines do not publish how many grants are sanctioned in a year, and no quota per state or per institution type is stated.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

Only students on the rolls of the institute may be members of the funded club. Funds sanctioned for that club cannot be used for any other programme. AICTE recommends that activities be held offline so that students actually meet the peers and experts invited, asks that they be spread across the year rather than concentrated in one event, and encourages clubs to collaborate with clubs working on the same subject in nearby institutions.

Credit for AICTE is written in as an obligation. Every publicity item tied to a funded event, from invitation cards to the stage backdrop, has to carry the AICTE logo and the name SPICES, and AICTE asks clubs to post about activities with the hashtags #aictespices and #aicte. Whether students are charged a registration fee for club events is left to the institute. AICTE may depute an officer or observer to a venue to see the work and collect feedback from those present. The council also expects the club to look past the grant: it asks clubs to reach out to alumni and industry to raise funds for their events, and to conduct as many activities as they can rather than one showpiece.

Get help

Contact

Scheme questions and portal questions go to two different desks. The scheme document puts scheme-related information with spicesidc@aicte-india.org on (011) 29581334, and technical information with itidc@aicte-india.org on (011) 29581313 or (011) 29581304. The council's office is at Nelson Mandela Marg, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi-110070, as printed on the scheme advertisement.

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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