AICTE SHORT TERM TRAINING PROGRAMME-SFURTI SCHEME(ASTPSS)

Overview

About ASTPSS

STTP-SFURTI is a 12 day training course for faculty and students, not the fund whose acronym it borrows. AICTE's own scheme document expands SFURTI as the Scheme of Fund for Regeneration of Traditional Industries, the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises programme that finances artisan clusters, and then sets understanding that scheme as the first objective of the training (STTP-SFURTI scheme document). An institution that arrived hunting cluster money has landed on a syllabus about it. The grant AICTE sanctions here never reaches that institution's account either; it goes to the delivery partner after the course. And on the Council's own listing the scheme's title carries its status inside a bracket: AICTE STTP-SFURTI (Scheme on hold in 2022-23) (AICTE Faculty Development Schemes listing).

The training exists to put technical faculty and students inside a scheme they would otherwise only read about. The stated purpose is to let faculty members and students in technical education introspect and learn techniques that help them apply their research work to the development of small-scale business, and the objectives beneath it run from understanding SFURTI, to identifying and presenting a project proposal, to writing a viable detailed project report, to resource management and project management in sustainable rural economic development (STTP-SFURTI scheme document).

AICTE supplies the money and the approval; the Indian Micro Enterprises Development Foundation, written throughout the document as IMEDF, designs and runs the course and hosts its field leg at one of its own clusters. The document describes IMEDF as a special purpose vehicle that accelerates the development of micro-enterprises, and as the nodal agency of the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises for the development of clusters under SFURTI. That split is why the sanctioned grant does not land where an institution expects it to.

The delivery pattern is fixed and unusually specific for an AICTE scheme row. A course runs for two weeks over 12 days in two phases: 10 days of online training, then 2 days of practical training combined with a visit to a SFURTI cluster. There are at least 2 sessions of 2 hours each every day, classes begin at 0900 h from Monday to Saturday, and capacity is 30 faculty members per programme (STTP-SFURTI scheme document).

IMEDF has published what one of these actually looked like. Its own account of the first pilot describes a 12 day virtual training on SFURTI held under AICTE's guidance for 20 faculty members drawn from polytechnic institutes across 4 north-eastern states, delivered through live sessions and hosted on the Universal Technical Systems learning platform, with the module split into 4 capsules on a day-wise plan. By the end IMEDF had graded every participant and received 14 concept notes and 11 detailed project reports on sectors including food processing, coffee plantation, cardamom, maize, natural dye weaving, bamboo products, pottery and woodcraft (IMEDF event record).

AICTE recorded the same fortnight from its own side, which is the only place the course carries a date. The minutes of the Council's 143rd Executive Committee meeting, held on June 10, 2021, list among the activities reported to the members that AICTE and IMEDF successfully conducted a 02 weeks course on SFURTI for faculty of AICTE approved institutions of North East states during April 26 to May 8 2021 (143rd Executive Committee minutes).

The career logic behind the fortnight sits in the SFURTI guidelines rather than in AICTE's document. A technical agency there is an established national-level institution with proven expertise in artisanal and small enterprise cluster development, engaged to give clusters close handholding and implementation support, and its listed duties include preparation and validation of cluster action plans and preparation of the comprehensive detailed project reports that go to the Scheme Steering Committee for final approval (SFURTI revised guidelines). IMEDF says it picked technical institutes for the pilot precisely because they already understand the technologies a cluster can use, if they present themselves as technical agencies to SFURTI clusters (IMEDF event record).

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

This scheme has never carried a calendar. Neither an open date nor a last date sits against it, and no annual window has ever been announced under the STTP-SFURTI name. The single timing promise the document makes to a participant is notice: course dates shall be informed one month prior.

Where the scheme stands today is written into its title. AICTE files it on the Council's Faculty Development Schemes listing as AICTE STTP-SFURTI (Scheme on hold in 2022-23), between the general FDC guidelines and the teacher training initiative, and hangs a single scheme document beneath it, with no apply link and no window (AICTE Faculty Development Schemes listing). The Council's other faculty development page, published at a different address under the same heading, runs from the ATAL Academy programmes through to VAANI and does not mention SFURTI anywhere (AICTE faculty development schemes). Both pages were read that way in September 2026. A hold is not a withdrawal, and the parenthesis is dated rather than open-ended, so an institution planning around this scheme is planning around a line AICTE has paused and has published nothing to restart.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The scheme document opens eligibility wider than the myScheme row suggests. All faculty members and students in areas of technical education at AICTE approved institutions may participate, so a student is not a bystander here; the course is written for both. The institutional condition and the participant condition sit on top of each other rather than replacing one another: the person must be at an institution AICTE has approved, and the approval is what the Council checks.

The document's other eligibility clause is not a test on a person at all. A maximum of 2 programmes will be conducted in each of 11 named states: Jharkhand, Arunachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Orissa, Nagaland, Chhattisgarh, Meghalaya, Tripura, Uttrakhand, Jammu and Kashmir, and Mizoram (STTP-SFURTI scheme document). Read that as a cap on how many courses land in a state, not as a bar on who may sit in one. No domicile condition appears anywhere in the document, and nothing in it bars a faculty member from Kerala or Gujarat; what the clause fixes is where the programmes go.

The one delivered cohort reads the same way. IMEDF drew its 20 participants from polytechnics in Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Manipur (IMEDF event record), and two of those four states are absent from the document's list of 11 (STTP-SFURTI scheme document). Nothing sets a minimum designation, a minimum length of service, an age bar or a discipline restriction for either a faculty member or a student.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

STTP-SFURTI carries no exclusion clause at all, so nobody is barred on paper. Attendance is what removes people in practice. Any faculty member or student absent for more than one day is withdrawn from the course, and the certificate is awarded only to those qualifying in the daily exams, exercises and assignments that carry weightage. Grading follows AICTE guidelines of 80 percent attendance and 60 percent qualified marks, both mandatory, with the field visit counted alongside them (STTP-SFURTI scheme document). A participant who joins the online fortnight and skips the cluster visit has not completed the programme.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Nothing in the scheme document or the scheme's public record describes a renewal, a second year, or a continuing entitlement. This is a single 12 day course with a certificate at the end, not a recurring award, and the only repeat limit published anywhere is the cap of 2 programmes per listed state (STTP-SFURTI scheme document).

What you get

Award & benefits

The scheme document writes its ceiling in words rather than digits. Under the heading limit of funding it prints Rs.Four Lakhs, four lakh rupees, and AICTE publishes no breakdown beneath it, no head-wise ceiling and no per-participant figure. Who receives the four lakh is the part most write-ups get wrong. The full amount of the sanctioned grant is released after the programme has been successfully conducted, and it is released to IMEDF. The amount spent by the institute on conducting the course is then adjusted against the utilisation certificate and detailed expenditure statement that IMEDF submits on the prescribed format (STTP-SFURTI scheme document). So the institution does not receive an advance, and it does not close the grant with its own paperwork; the delivery partner does both.

The non-cash side matters more to a participant than the grant does. IMEDF is responsible for boarding, lodging and transport, which is what makes the cluster visit reachable for a polytechnic teacher who would not otherwise travel to one. Certificates are issued by AICTE and IMEDF together, and for students AICTE issues them on the recommendation of IMEDF faculty.

• Financial Assistance: Limit of funding ₹ 4,00,000/- to the institution.
• Disbursement of the Fund: The full amount of the grant sanctioned shall be released after successful conduct of the program to Indian Micro Enterprises Development Foundation (IMEDF).
• The amount spent by the institute on the conduct of STTP-SFURTI shall be adjusted on the basis of utilization certificate and detailed expenditure statement submitted by the IMEDF on the prescribed format along with other mandatory documents viz feedback form, copy of proceedings and completion report etc

What to prepare

Documents required

The documents the scheme names are closure paperwork, not an application pack. A student or a faculty member is not asked for an income certificate, a caste certificate, a mark sheet or a bank passbook anywhere in this scheme, because the money never travels to them.

Attendance and marks travel with the closure as well, filed under the document's processing clauses rather than under its document list, which is why they get overlooked. IMEDF shares attendance and the marks scored by students within 7 days of the course ending, with its recommendations for issuing certificates, and it shares a presentation of 3 to 4 slides on each course covering attendance, results, the field visit and the detailed project reports that came out of it (STTP-SFURTI scheme document).

Step by step

How to apply

Nobody applies to STTP-SFURTI, and the gap in the paperwork is not a reporting oversight. The scheme document carries no proforma, no last date and no portal address, while the scheme's own row marks the mode online and then gives no link to go to (myScheme record). What the document sets out instead is a nomination flow. AICTE shares the details of the faculty members detailed to attend with IMEDF one week before the programme, and participants then register for the online course as per the details AICTE provides, logging in daily through the online platform and the UTS learning platform (STTP-SFURTI scheme document). Participants are told to be self-contained for writing material, which is the document's way of saying nobody is issuing them stationery.

Because there is no SFURTI application to file, there is nothing under that name to track either. AICTE Quality Improvement Schemes, the umbrella the Council uses to give institutions financial assistance, lists a general Short Term Training Programme among its faculty development schemes and carries no SFURTI row of its own (AQIS scheme list). An institute filing under that general row watches its proposal from inside the record it created rather than on a status page of its own. In the AQIS user manual for the scheme, a Status field fills itself in when the application is created, alongside the identifier and the duration, and it reads Submitted from the moment the declaration has been ticked, saved and the submission confirmed, with that day recorded as the date of submission (AQIS user manual for STTP).

How winners are picked

Selection process

No marking scheme, no committee and no ranking rule for choosing between institutions or between individual applicants appears in the document. What it publishes are the two ceilings that settle most of it in practice: a maximum of 2 programmes in each listed state, and a course capacity of 30 faculty members per programme (STTP-SFURTI scheme document).

The wording of the processing clause is the clearest signal about who does the choosing. AICTE shares the details of the faculty members detailed to attend, one week before the programme begins. Detailed is an assignment word, not an application word, and IMEDF receives the list rather than assembling it. On IMEDF's account of the pilot, the 20 faculty members came from polytechnic institutes in the north-east, which is consistent with a cohort put together by state and institution type rather than by individual competition (IMEDF event record).

Selection at the other end of the course is explicit. A test is conducted at the end of the programme by IMEDF, grading follows the 80 percent attendance and 60 percent marks rule with the field visit added, and AICTE issues student certificates on IMEDF's recommendation (STTP-SFURTI scheme document).

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The conditions are written mostly at IMEDF and only partly at the participant. A formal sanction letter is issued by AICTE to IMEDF on acceptance of the instructions in the document, which is the moment the arrangement becomes binding, and payment follows completion rather than preceding it (STTP-SFURTI scheme document).

For a participant the terms are attendance, daily assessment and the field visit. Attendance is marked every day from 09.00 AM, and weightage is given to exams, exercises and assignments at the end of each day, with the certificate going only to those who qualify in them. The cluster visit begins at 0800 h on the day of the practical and ends with dispersal at 1600 h the following day, the 12th day of the programme, so it is a residential commitment rather than a site tour that can be joined late (STTP-SFURTI scheme document).

For IMEDF the terms are reporting. It submits the feedback form at the end of the training, files the utilisation certificate and expenditure statement on the prescribed format, sends attendance and marks with certificate recommendations within a week, and produces a short presentation on each course. The detailed project reports participants write are explicitly named among the outcomes that presentation is expected to cover, which makes the DPR the scheme's real deliverable rather than an optional exercise.

Get help

Contact

No helpdesk, email address or telephone number is published for STTP-SFURTI in either the scheme document or the scheme's public record, and the entry AICTE maintains for it hangs a scheme document beneath the title and stops there (AICTE Faculty Development Schemes listing). The document's only named correspondent is IMEDF, which receives the sanction letter, the participant list and the payment, so a question about a scheduled course belongs with the delivery partner rather than with the Council.

For anything that has to reach AICTE, the Council's contact page carries a general enquiry form whose category list includes faculty programmes; the head office it prints sits on Nelson Mandela Marg at Vasant Kunj, New Delhi-110070, on 011-26131576-78,80 (AICTE contact page).

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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