AICTE-Swanath Scholarship Scheme For Students(AICTE-SSSS)

Applications are invited once a year. For the 2026-27 cycle the portal's scheme list gives the degree and the diploma halves of Swanath an identical calendar.

Those five rows are the whole published calendar. No date is fixed anywhere for the merit list or for the DBT credit, which is why the two grievance windows are written as periods rather than deadlines: they only start counting on the day AICTE puts the list up.

Four conditions have to hold at once. The guidelines print an explicit note under them saying that only students satisfying all four are eligible, so there is no partial case here.

The first condition is the category, and this is where the May 2025 guidelines went wider than the description the scheme carried for its first four years. Alongside an orphan, a student whose either or both parents died due to Covid 19, and a ward of Armed Forces and Central Paramilitary Forces martyred in action, the document now names a fourth route: a parent suffering from a critical life threatening disease such as cancer, or a parent who died or was severely disabled, above 80 percent, in an accident, as defined under the RPwD Act 2016. A family in that position was outside the scheme before and is inside it now.

The second condition is money. Rs 8 lakh is the ceiling on family income, counted from every source, for the financial year in which you apply. The guidelines will not take your word for that figure either: a valid income certificate issued by the State or UT Government has to be enclosed.

The third condition is the one worth reading twice. You must be currently studying at an AICTE approved institution, in an approved course, at degree or diploma level, in regular mode, and the guidelines accept the 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th year. A student already in the third year of a B.Tech can apply fresh. What shrinks with every year you wait is the tenure, not the entitlement.

The fourth is exclusivity, and it is absolute: you cannot already be receiving a Central Government, State Government or AICTE sponsored scholarship.

One disqualification has nothing to do with the tragedy that brought the student to the scheme. Holding a Central, State or AICTE sponsored scholarship already rules you out, and the bar is on the fact of the award, not on how small it is.

Two more exits are written into the guidelines. A candidate who fails or drops out in a subsequent year is not eligible for any further scholarship, with no reinstatement route. And an application without the candidate's Aadhaar number is not accepted at all, which makes Aadhaar a filter at submission rather than a document checked later.

The guidelines also throw out anything incomplete without a second look, and they count only verified online applications when the award is made. A form your institute has left untouched is therefore not sitting in a queue. It is out of the reckoning.

Every year of Swanath after the first is a fresh transaction on the portal, and one certificate carries it. The guidelines ask for a renewal submitted on the National Scholarship Portal, with a promotion certificate and a bonafide certificate from the Head of the Institution. Miss the promotion, or miss the window, and the same sentence forfeits the award in both cases: a late renewal costs the scholarship as surely as a failed year does.

The state directorates say the same thing in operational language. Maharashtra's DTE tells students who were approved in the previous academic year that renewing online within the deadline shown on the portal is mandatory, in the same notice that tells fresh first-year and direct second-year entrants to apply.

Swanath pays one figure and only one: Rs 50,000 a year, for every year of study, released after selection as a lump sum through DBT on an annual basis. The scheme guidelines put that money against payment of college fee and the purchase of a computer, stationery, books, equipment and software, then close the door on anything beyond it: no additional grant is payable in lieu of hostel charges or medical charges, so a student living away from home draws exactly what a student living at home draws.

How long it runs is set by the year you are in when you first apply, because the total tenure is counted back from the end of the course.

Each year after the first has to be renewed, so the last column of that table is a ceiling rather than a promise.

Your category decides the paperwork, and the guidelines attach a form for the hardest case. Where an orphan candidate cannot produce death certificates for both parents, the scheme accepts a certificate in the format at Annexure I, signed by an SDM or Tehsildar with the rubber stamp and seal of the signing authority, naming both parents and the dates of death. Do not improvise that certificate. It is a printed format and it is part of the guidelines document.

For a Covid-19 case, the death certificate has to explicitly mention that the death was due to Covid-19, which is a stricter test than a certificate that merely dates the death to the pandemic years. Where one parent is alive, a current year income certificate stating in terms that family income is less than Rs 8 lakh, issued by the Competent Authority, goes up alongside it. A ward of a martyr uploads the death certificate, the Shaheed certificate issued by the Armed Forces or Central Paramilitary Forces, and the same current year income certificate.

Every category also uploads a bonafide certificate from the institution and the mark sheets: 10+2 and Class 10 at degree level, Class 10 at diploma level. Treat those mark sheets as the scoring document rather than as proof of study, because they are the numbers the merit list is built from.

AICTE opens the cycle with a notice on its own website and on the portal, and until that notice appears there is no Swanath form to fill. Once it does, everything happens online on the National Scholarship Portal, and your first decision is which of the two listings to open, the degree one or the diploma one.

Two offices then work on the file. Your host institution verifies the online application first. The State or UT technical education directorate, which the guidelines abbreviate to DTE, carries out the second level of scrutiny, which is why a state office can turn out to be the one holding your file: Maharashtra's government has formally declared its Directorate of Technical Education the nodal office for Swanath in that state.

Tracking splits along those same two stages. While the file is still moving, the Application Status and Track Your Payment services on scholarships.gov.in show where the form has reached and whether an instalment has moved. Once selection is done the trail shifts to AICTE, which uploads a provisional list of shortlisted candidates on its web portal. Counting from the date that list is published, the guidelines give you one month to raise a grievance about the merit list and entertain nothing about it afterwards, while money that never arrived because the account number was invalid or wrong runs on a longer clock of six months from the same date.

The rank is arithmetic, not discretion. At degree level the only input is your percentage of marks in the 10+2 or equivalent examination, and at diploma level it is your percentage in Class 10 or equivalent. Reservation applies as per Government of India norms.

Ties are broken differently at the two levels. For a degree tie, the guidelines go first to the higher percentage in the Class 10 examination, then to the elder candidate, then to the lower annual family income. For a diploma tie, there is no earlier examination to fall back on, so age comes first and family income second.

The percentage itself is calculated by rules worth reading before you assume your figure. A CGPA is converted by multiplying it by a factor of 9.5, the guidelines say, and where a mark sheet carries both CGPA and total marks, total marks are used. Grades such as A1 or B2 are converted to CGPA first and then to a percentage. And for 10+2, the percentage is computed on the marks in any five subjects, so the subject set you count changes your rank.

AICTE implements and monitors the scheme itself, even though your institution and your state DTE do the verification. That matters when something goes wrong, because the file is theirs and the money is theirs.

The condition with real financial consequences is the one about other income. The grant is conditional on you taking no financial assistance in the shape of a scholarship, emoluments, salary or stipend from any other source while the course runs. Break that and the guidelines do two things: they discontinue the award, and they require everything already paid to go back to AICTE by demand draft drawn in favour of the Member Secretary, AICTE, payable at New Delhi. Read the clause before you accept a stipended internship in a later year, because what comes back is the whole of what Swanath has paid you, not that one year of it.

Escalate in the order the file moves. Before the lists are out, a question about your own application belongs to your institution's nodal officer, the office that verifies and forwards it, and after that to the Directorate of Technical Education of your State or UT, which does the second scrutiny. The merit list itself is AICTE's, and a grievance about it has to reach the Student Development Cell inside the one month window, at the address on the cover of the scheme guidelines: All India Council for Technical Education, Vasant Kunj, Nelson Mandela Marg, New Delhi- 110070. A portal fault, as opposed to a scheme question, goes instead to the National Scholarship Portal helpdesk linked from scholarships.gov.in.