Centrally Sponsored Scheme of Pre-matric Scholarship to Other Backward Classes (OBC) for Studies in India(CSSPREMSOBCSI)

Overview

About CSSPREMSOBCSI

The rate card most parents find under this scheme name is no longer the one a school will act on. This scholarship was formulated in 1998-99 (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment) and its guidelines were last revised with effect from 2017-18, when it still ran from Class I to Class X on a monthly stipend (Pre-Matric Scholarship to OBC guidelines, revised 2017-18). A Class 4 child lined up for that stipend today is being planned for on rules the Ministry has since replaced.

The name on this page belongs to the older design. That scheme was folded into PM-YASASVI, the umbrella the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment built for OBC, EBC and DNT students, and it is the pre-matric component inside that umbrella which a state sanctions and pays today (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines).

Three things changed together, and each of them decides money. The class range narrowed to Class IX and Class X. The school type narrowed to government schools. The monthly stipend became one consolidated academic allowance of Rs 4,000 a year (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines). The Ministry set that out in a written reply in the Lok Sabha: from 2021-22 it decided to provide the scholarship only to students of classes 9 and 10 under the pre-matric scheme for OBCs, and from 2022-23 the pre-matric scholarship scheme is available for students only in Class 9 and 10 (Change in Pre-Matric Scholarship Scheme, Press Information Bureau, 20 December 2022).

The trim was not a wind-down. The Ministry recorded Rs 32.44 crore released to states and union territories for the pre-matric component during 2023-24, counted to 18 January 2024 (Press Information Bureau, 25 January 2024). What the change did was move the money to a narrower group of children.

Where the award is decided has not changed. The Department of Social Justice and Empowerment writes the rules and sends a share of the funds; the state or union territory the child is domiciled in sanctions the award, verifies it and pays it, for studies in India only.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

The scheme carries a processing calendar of its own, and it runs earlier than the deadlines most scholarship pages quote.

Those are the dates the centre and the states work to internally, not a public application deadline. What binds a particular family is the date its own state advertises, and the guidelines place that duty on the state: it announces the scheme in leading-language newspapers, local dailies and through its own websites and scholarship portals (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines). States have used dates well outside the central frame, and Manipur's circular for this scheme set 30 January 2024 as the last date for online registration (Manipur circular for the OBC pre-matric scholarship). Treat the central timetable as the shape of the year and the state notice as the deadline.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Two official pages disagree about the money test, and a family that reads the wrong one can talk itself out of an award it qualifies for.

The guidelines govern. Income of the parents or guardians from all sources must not exceed Rs 2,50,000 a year, and that ceiling is identical in the 2017-18 revision and in the current text (Pre-Matric Scholarship to OBC guidelines, revised 2017-18; PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines). The Ministry's own frequently-asked-questions page for the welfare of Other Backward Classes has not been brought into line: it still answers that the pre-matric award goes to candidates whose parents' income does not exceed Rs 44500 a year, with Rs 1 lakh quoted for the post-matric award (FAQs, Welfare of the Other Backward Classes, Department of Social Justice and Empowerment).

Between those two figures, apply on the guidelines. They are the scheme's own rulebook, they are the later text, and they are what a state works from when it sanctions. The FAQ page is a departmental information page that traces its figure to no scheme document. A household earning between the two numbers is inside the scheme, not outside it, and where a state office quotes the lower one the binding answer is worth getting in writing from the district social welfare officer, whom the Ministry itself names as the point of contact (FAQs, Welfare of the Other Backward Classes).

Income on its own admits nobody. The award now reaches a full-time student of Class IX or Class X in a government school, holding a valid OBC, EBC or DNT certificate, awarded by the state or union territory of domicile (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines).

Two mechanical conditions decide the borderline cases. The previous year's attendance record has to reach 75 per cent, and the income certificate is taken once, at admission, rather than filed again each year (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines). The 2017-18 text also carried a compassionate provision worth knowing about: where an earning parent dies and the household then falls inside the ceiling, the child becomes eligible from the month the death occurred, and an application from such a student may be considered even after the last date has passed (Pre-Matric Scholarship to OBC guidelines, revised 2017-18).

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

Ask this scheme's public record what disqualifies a child and it answers with a blank. The disqualifications are real; the guidelines simply keep them inside the conditions of award instead of gathering them under one label.

The quietest is the school. A Class IX child from an OBC household well under the income line, studying in a private school whether aided or unaided, is outside this component, because the current text confines the award to government schools (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines).

Family size sets a second limit, and it is asymmetric. Two boys of the same parents or guardian is the ceiling, and the restriction is written so that girls fall outside it, so a daughter's scholarship does not consume one of the two places open to sons.

Four more disqualify in practice. A second pre-matric award cannot be stacked on this one, and a child offered both keeps one and tells the head of the institution which. A class already funded is not funded twice, so a second run at Class IX earns nothing. Changing school in the middle of an academic year is not normally permitted. And a false claim carries a permanent consequence rather than a rejection: the scholarship is cancelled forthwith, the state may recover what it has paid, and the child is blacklisted and debarred from scholarship under any scheme (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines).

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Nothing is filed again. Where the school certifies that a scholar has been promoted, has rejoined and holds the attendance, the portal is meant to carry the award forward on its own, and the guidelines go past permitting that to forbidding it: there should be no requirement for the student to apply for renewals (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines).

Payment then continues until the child passes Class X, held in place by two tests the school reports on: academic performance the competent authority is satisfied with, and an attendance record of 75 per cent in each academic year, which the guidelines want read off an Aadhaar-based attendance system rather than a register. Illness that keeps a scholar out of the annual examination is treated as an excusable gap rather than a failure, on a certificate from the prescribed authority that the institution accepts.

States add a payment condition on top of that, and it is not about promotion at all. Manipur tells applicants for this scheme that only students who actually received the scholarship payment from the national portal in the previous year are able to use the renewal route; a sanctioned award that never landed sends the family back to a fresh application rather than a renewal (PM-YASASVI Pre-Matric Scholarship Scheme for OBC Students, Class IX and X, Manipur).

What you get

Award & benefits

Two rate cards circulate under this name and only one of them is payable.

For the two classes that survived the switch, the arithmetic does not all run downhill. A day scholar in Class IX used to draw Rs 100 a month across 10 months plus the Rs 500 ad-hoc grant, so Rs 4,000 a year is a substantial rise for that child; a hosteller on Rs 500 a month plus the same grant is worse off (Pre-Matric Scholarship to OBC guidelines, revised 2017-18; PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines). The households that lost outright are the ones whose children are below Class IX.

Both shares travel together. Central money and state money are combined and credited by direct benefit transfer to the student or a parent, preferably over the Aadhaar Payment Bridge, so there is no separate state cheque to chase and no parallel route the guidelines will recognise.

• Hostellers: Class 3rd to 10th: ₹ 500/- per month for 10 months.
• Day Scholars: Class 1st to 10th: ₹ 100/- per month for 10 months.
• An ad-hoc grant of ₹ 500/- per student per annum to all students i.e. hostlers as well as day scholars will also be given.
• The scholarship amount will be payable from the date of joining to the date of leaving the school, excluding the period of vacation, which will be about 10 months in a year except in the cases where the students enter late or leave early in the midst of academic year.

What to prepare

Documents required

A family reading the certificate list below should know that the guidelines want none of them uploaded at all. Instead of files, the portal is supposed to read the income, domicile and caste certificate databases that the state or district administration already holds, reaching them through DigiLocker or an equivalent mechanism and matching on the Aadhaar number. Until such a system is running, a manual check has 30 days from the date of application, after which approval is presumed (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines).

Practice has not caught up everywhere, and the state's list is the one that governs a live application. Beyond the certificates the record already names, Manipur's circular for this scheme also asks for an admission receipt, a scanned copy of the bank passbook and a self-attested copy of the previous academic mark sheet (Manipur circular for the OBC pre-matric scholarship).

One document behaves differently from the rest. The income certificate is required once, at admission, which is why a family that files it correctly in Class IX is not asked to produce a fresh one for Class X (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines).

The category certificate is the other gate, and the pre-matric guidelines add no creamy-layer test on top of it: the income ceiling does that work here (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines).

Step by step

How to apply

Every application is filed online and the paper route is closed in terms: there shall be no paper applications (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines). Registration for the 2026-27 academic year opened on 1 June 2026, though that is the portal's own cycle date rather than a deadline belonging to this component (National Scholarship Portal).

The school, not the parent, controls the timing, and the rule is tighter than most families expect. The guidelines put the application on the day of admission itself and require the institution to record on the portal, before that same day is out, that the child has taken admission and is a bonafide student. A state already running its own scholarship portal with the prescribed features may keep using it, provided it shares data with the central portal in real time, which is why some families are sent to a state site instead of the central one (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines).

Manipur's circular names the three entries a family meets on the portal: New Registration to obtain an application identifier, Fresh Application for a first claim, and Renewal Application against the previous year's identifier and the student's date of birth (Manipur circular for the OBC pre-matric scholarship).

Tracking the application and the payment. Two systems answer two different questions, and this scheme needs both because the paying authority is the state rather than the Ministry. Whether the file has been verified is visible behind the student login on the national scholarship portal (application status login). Whether money actually moved is a separate lookup on the Public Financial Management System, whose payment enquiry carries a Track NSP Payments option (Know Your Payment, Public Financial Management System). The sequence is what makes the distinction useful here: central assistance is released into the state nodal account first and the state then pays the child by direct benefit transfer, so a verified file with nothing credited is usually waiting on the state's leg of that chain rather than on the school. Because payment runs on the Aadhaar number checked against the NPCI mapper, an unseeded account is the other common cause, and seeding status is checkable from the portal's own links (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines).

How winners are picked

Selection process

There is no examination, no merit list and no ranking of one child against another. The state or union territory lays down the detailed procedure for selecting students within the central guidelines, which is why two neighbouring states can run visibly different processes for the same scheme (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines).

What the centre contributes is a search instruction rather than a filter. States are told to make special efforts to find the poorest eligible households, enrol those children in mission mode and then keep watching that they stay in school, with two population markers named for that search: deprivation counts of three or more in the socio-economic and caste census of 2011, and parental illiteracy on one side or both (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines).

Two quotas bind whatever a state settles on: girl students take three in every ten awards, and students with disabilities not less than one in twenty (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines).

The real constraint on selection is money rather than merit, because the guidelines call it a funds-limited scheme and expect a state to hold the number of awards inside what its allocation will cover.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The funding pattern changed alongside the rate card, and it is the least-noticed part of the switch. The 2017-18 guidelines put 50 per cent of the cost on the centre, with the balance borne by the state government and full central assistance in the union territories (Pre-Matric Scholarship to OBC guidelines, revised 2017-18). Under the current text the centre's half has become 60 per cent, rising to 90 per cent in the north-eastern states and in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, with the balance of 40 or 10 per cent falling on the state and the whole cost carried centrally in union territories that have no legislature (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines).

Central assistance is apportioned to states pro rata on population and similar criteria and conveyed as a notional allocation at the start of each financial year, against which the state sends its proposal and is expected to spend at least the sum of that assistance and its matching share (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines). Going beyond the allocation from its own plan is open to a state, but it bears that cost itself and is generally not reimbursed, with additional central assistance considered towards the end of a financial year only if savings appear in the notional allocation. So a state that files its proposal late or under-provides its own share does not merely delay a payment; it shrinks the number of awards its children can be given.

The older text was explicit about something the current one leaves unsaid, and it still explains a gap on the map. The notional allocation was worked out on each state's population excluding states and union territories that notify no list of Other Backward Classes, and it named them: Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Lakshadweep (Pre-Matric Scholarship to OBC guidelines, revised 2017-18).

Nothing in the document is fixed for good: administrative, monitoring and evaluation cost is capped at 1 per cent of the annual scheme cost, and the closing clause leaves every provision changeable at the Government of India's discretion. One further point has to be read plainly. The title page dates these guidelines 2021-2022 to 2025-26, and no successor document covering the years after that has appeared on the scheme pages (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines). That is a gap in what has been published rather than a withdrawal of the scheme: states continue to run it and the Ministry has continued to release money against it. It does mean the terms for the current year are worth confirming with the state department before a family plans around them.

Get help

Contact

The Ministry sends applicants to the state rather than to itself. Its own answer to how one applies names the respective state's Department of Social Welfare or Department of Social Justice and Empowerment, or the district social welfare officer (FAQs, Welfare of the Other Backward Classes).

Two helpdesks cover the portal, and which one to call turns on whether the award has been sanctioned yet. Before sanction, the application belongs to NSP: helpdesk@nsp.gov.in, 0120 - 6619540. After it, a missing credit is PFMS business: helpdesk-pfms@gov.in, toll free 1800 118 111. Neither line is a round-the-clock service: the published hours are 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM, government holidays excepted (NSP helpdesk).

Neither helpdesk is the right address for a school that will not verify. That belongs to the Grievance Redressal Officer the guidelines make every institution appoint, and a complaint the school does not settle is meant to climb on its own to the district and then to the state (PM-YASASVI scheme guidelines). The same complaint can be filed on the portal (grievance registration).

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.

Explore more

Related scholarships

References

Sources