C H Muhammedkoya Scholarship(CHMS)

There is no standing annual date on this scheme. The directorate notified the renewal round in December and the fresh round the following January, and each notification set out a chain of stage dates rather than a single deadline.

Extensions come with the territory. The fresh round above was pushed to 10 February 2025 by a further notification dated 3 February 2025, issued on the same portal. A student who has missed a stage is waiting on the next notification, and the news and updates list on the department's site is where it appears first.

She has to be a girl student, a permanent resident of Kerala, and studying a degree, postgraduate or professional course at a government or aided institution in the state. A merit seat at a self financing college counts as well, and the current notification names self financing medical and engineering colleges in as many words. The qualifying examination mark must be 50% or above, the family's annual income must not cross Rs 8 lakh, with BPL card holders given preference, and the applicant needs an account in her own name at a nationalised or scheduled bank, per the directorate's notification No. MWD/12/2025-S dated 06-01-2025.

The same notification quietly settles a question that trips up second and third year students. Anyone who missed the round in her earlier years may apply for the year she is studying now, so a first year admission is not the only entry point.

Which communities qualify is where published summaries disagree, and the notification is unambiguous: Muslim, Christian of every denomination, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain and Parsi students, with the awards distributed in proportion to those communities' populations. That wording follows a judgment. On 28 May 2021 a division bench of Chief Justice S Manikumar and Justice Shaji P Chaly held that the state could not sub classify notified minorities by allotting 80% of its merit cum means scholarships to Muslims and 20% to Latin Catholic and converted Christians, and directed the government to pass fresh orders providing the scholarship to notified minority communities equally, in accordance with the latest population census available with the State Minority Commission, as LiveLaw reported from the judgment.

The order the department issued afterwards, dated 16.07.2021, provides the benefit of all minority scholarships on the basis of population percentage in the 2011 Census, as quoted in LiveLaw's report on the petition against it.

That order has itself been litigated. A writ petition against it, W.P.(C) No. 404/2022, was tagged by the Supreme Court in 2022 with the special leave petitions already pending against the High Court judgment, as LiveLaw reported. The directorate's current notification still allots the awards in proportion to those populations.

Kerala publishes no bar list for this scheme. The notification writes down duties instead, and a claim dies wherever one of them is missed:

• Asking for both benefits. A student may apply for the scholarship or for the hostel stipend, and choosing one closes the other.
• A bank account that is not in the applicant's own name, at a nationalised or scheduled bank.
• Wrong account number, IFSC code or branch details. The notification puts that check on the institution head and states that the department is not answerable if a scholarship is rejected because it was done badly.
• An application the head of the institution has not verified and approved online inside the dates the notification names.
• A renewal claim from a student who did not hold the scholarship in the previous academic year.

Renewal is a separate round with its own notification, its own earlier calendar and a narrow gate: only students who received the scholarship in the previous academic year may claim it, as the renewal notification for 2024-25 sets out. The rates do not change on renewal, and the choice between scholarship and hostel stipend is made again.

What a renewal applicant submits is shorter than a fresh file, and two items carry the weight. A hosteller has to hand in the current year's hostel fee receipt with the application, and the head of the institution has to satisfy herself that it is this year's receipt and not last year's. Where the previous year's examination result has not been published yet, the institution head obtains a certificate to that effect instead of a mark list.

The rate card in the directorate's current notification runs like this, paid once a year for the year applied for.

The hostel stipend is the larger of the two, and it reaches further than the phrase recognised hostel suggests. A student in a college hostel qualifies, and so does one living in a private hostel that the head of her institution has approved, which is what decides the case of a student housed outside her campus.

How many awards the scheme carries is not in that notification at all. The only published count sits in the Directorate of Collegiate Education's listing, in a row dated 2017: 3,000 undergraduate awards, 1,000 postgraduate, 1,000 for professional courses and 2,000 hostel stipends, beside a rate card of Rs 4,000, Rs 5,000, Rs 6,000 and Rs 12,000 and an income ceiling of Rs 4.50 lakh, on its scholarship page. That row is why older write ups of this scheme quote smaller money and a lower ceiling. The minority welfare directorate has raised both since, and its notification does not restate the counts.

The scheme record lists the papers. Three things about them sit only in the notification. The allotment memo has to be attached, which the summaries leave out entirely. The income certificate goes in as the original from the Village Office, and the head of the institution encloses it, with the allotment memo, along with the application rather than filing either separately. A hosteller adds a document proving she is a hosteller, on top of the hostel fee paper.

The uploads carry a size rule that decides whether the form can be printed at all. Photo, signature, SSLC certificate, income certificate, ration card copy and hostel fee receipt each have to be under 100 KB, and the print out of the registration form does not unlock until every one of them is in, as the notification's step list states. Keep the tenth standard register number to hand as well, because the registration form asks for it as the examination detail.

The route starts on the minority welfare department's website, at the scholarship menu, on the C.H. Mohammed Koya Scholarship link, then Apply online. A student who has already registered for another of the department's schemes logs in with those credentials instead of registering again. The form moves through tabs, examination details first, then personal details and scholarship details, then the uploads, and two selections inside it matter more than they look: whether she is a hosteller and whether the hostel is approved by her institution head, and, at a self financing professional college, whether her admission came through a merit seat.

Submitting online is the halfway point. She then opens View or Print Application, prints the registration form, and gives the signed print out with the documents to the head of her institution, who verifies and approves it online. Government and aided institutions keep those papers and produce them when the directorate asks; a self financing college sends them on to the directorate by hand or by post.

Tracking runs entirely through the portal. A candidate login with the registration ID, date of birth and password shows the status of an application at any point, and the department's own answer to that question adds a second route, the Registered students list on the home page, in its list of frequently asked questions. The public Registered Students Status page takes a year, a scholarship name and whether the claim is fresh or renewal; the Awarded Students List page returns the sanctioned list for a year, which is the closest thing to a payment confirmation the portal publishes. If a mistake surfaces after the file has gone to the college, the institution can revert the verification status so the student can edit and reprint.

Selection turns on family income rather than marks. The notification says applicants are chosen on the basis of annual family income, with BPL card holders preferred, so the 50% qualifying mark works as a floor for entry and not as the ranking rule.

The portal adds one thing worth knowing to that. It keeps a Cut Off Marks lookup that returns a figure for a chosen year and scholarship, this one among them, so where a past round did come down to a mark, the number is published rather than left to guesswork.

The head of the institution is the gatekeeper here, and most of the conditions are addressed to that office rather than to the student. The documents are verified online and then approved online, both inside the notified dates, and the notification puts the consequence of missing them on the institution. The original income certificate and the allotment memo travel with the application. Bank details are checked separately and specifically, because that is the field that gets scholarships rejected after sanction.

For the student the practical condition is narrower, because every remedy in the notification runs through her college. The institution head verifies, approves, encloses the certificates and answers for a missed date, so a file that never left the college never reached the directorate at all.

Two numbers reach the scholarship section of the Directorate of Minority Welfare, 0471 2300524 and 0471 2302090, and the office sits on the fourth floor of Vikas Bhavan, Thiruvananthapuram, as printed on its notifications. Applications from self financing colleges are posted to that address. Anything the college has to fix, from a reverted verification to a forgotten password, is handled by the institution and not by the directorate.