Collaborative Research Scheme (CRS)(CRS)

No calendar exists for CRS. The myScheme record carries neither an opening nor a closing date, and AICTE has not published a recurring annual window.

Two CRS bulletins surface on AICTE's site, both from 2019 and both filed under the Announcement category. The call inviting research proposals from young faculty in AICTE-approved TEQIP-funded institutes is dated Wednesday, 24 April 2019. The selection of proposals announced for Phase-I followed on Tuesday, 18 June 2019. Neither page carries a body, an attachment, a list of eligible institutes or a list of selected projects, so an institute cannot read its own outcome off them.

Inside a sanctioned project the date that governs everything is a different one. The one-year clock starts from the day funds are received in the institute's account, not from the date on the sanction letter.

The wider programme timeline is the context a prospective PI needs. On 26 July 2021 the Ministry of Education told the Lok Sabha that TEQIP-III, running with World Bank assistance since 1 April 2017, was going to conclude on 30 September 2021; that it had written to the chief secretaries of the focus states asking them to plan for the continuation of TEQIP-III activities; and that a token Rs 10 crore had been placed in the 2021-22 budget to start preparatory work on a successor, MERITE, all in the same Lok Sabha reply. The programme had been signed with 18 states and 1 union territory and was to select an estimated 200 government and government-aided engineering institutes and affiliating technical universities, and that is the institute pool the scheme's TEQIP condition points at.

Two separate tests run here, and the institutional one is settled by software before a human reads anything.

The host institute has to be approved by AICTE. If any course of the institute is unapproved, the portal refuses to create a CRS application and returns an error at that step, per the CRS user manual. It also has to be a TEQIP institute. The scheme document says the list of TEQIP institutes is attached with it, but the published document runs to two pages and carries no such list, so a department that is unsure of its status has to settle that with AICTE before drafting anything.

On the people side, the Principal Investigator is not typed in but picked. The application screen opens a window of faculty already recorded at the institute and the PI is selected by TEQIP Faculty ID, which is the practical reason a faculty member cannot lead a proposal from outside a TEQIP institute. The sample form is stricter than the scheme document about where the rest of the group comes from: Co-PI 2 is drawn from any TEQIP institute, IIT or NIT, while Co-PI 3 and Co-PI 4 may also come from industry or from a faculty abroad.

Co-PI-1 is the seat AICTE writes conditions around, and the conditions are not all of the same strength. A regular faculty member of the host institute is what the scheme document asks for, and the portal echoes that as a soft validation on the Co-PI 1 tab; working in the PI's research area is preferred but not required; belonging to the PI's own department is the part stated without a hedge. Why the seat exists at all becomes clear in the terms, where Co-PI-1 is the only route by which a project survives its PI leaving.

myScheme publishes no exclusion list for CRS at all. The scheme document does rule things out, and what it rules out is spending rather than applicants.

• No part of the grant may be used to go abroad for a conference or a seminar. Travel to present a paper at a conference within India may be met from the recurring component.
• Separate institutional overheads for executing the project are not provided.
• Once a project is sanctioned, AICTE will not consider a request for additional grant.
• Money cannot be moved between the recurring and non-recurring heads, and the equipment list the experts settle is final.

Those four sit in section 1.7 of the scheme document. The only applicant-side limit lives in the eligibility clause instead: a PI may put in two proposals, but only one can be under sanction at any point during a project.

There is no renewal route, and none is implied. The project runs one year from the date funds reach the institute's account, and the scheme document publishes no extension, no second year and no re-application path for the same project. The second release of money is a milestone payment against a utilisation certificate and an expert review, not a renewal of the award.

The ceiling is Rs 25 lakh, and the shape of the spending is fixed before a rupee moves: 60 per cent non-recurring and 40 per cent recurring, unless TEQIP experts recommend otherwise, as set out in the scheme document. Non-recurring means equipment. Recurring means the cost of running the work.

The recurring side is capped component by component inside the portal, and those caps are not in the scheme document at all.

The portal checks each figure against its own ceiling as the row is saved, so the shape of the recurring budget is settled before an expert committee reads a word of the proposal. Those four ceilings together account for the entire 40 per cent recurring share of a full Rs 25 lakh grant, which is the practical trap: a consumables-heavy project cannot buy itself room by spending less on travel.

Disbursement comes in two parts. The first instalment is 25 per cent of the sanctioned non-recurring grant and 25 per cent of the sanctioned recurring grant. The balance of both follows only after the utilisation certificate, the requisite documents and an expert committee's review of the project, again per the scheme document. Planning a project that spends most of its equipment budget in month one does not fit that release pattern.

One funding line sits awkwardly beside the terms in the same two-page document. The limit-of-funding clause allows extra funds in special cases; the terms then say that once a project is sanctioned the Council will not consider any request for an additional grant. AICTE publishes no test for what makes a case special, so a budget written in the expectation of topping it up later is a budget written against an undefined exception.

Five attachments go up with the application, and all five are AICTE proformas rather than free-form files. The user manual puts them behind the scheme details tab: the proformas appear for download only after the title, area, lab and department have been saved.

The mandate form carries the institute's bank details, signed by the head of the institution and by the bank, and it has to describe the same account already confirmed on the portal. The certificate of collaboration goes on the host institute's letterhead, names Co-PI-1 to Co-PI-4 with their institutions, states that the group agrees to finish the work in a time-bound manner, and closes under the signature and seal of the head of the host institute. Bio-data is asked for the PI and every Co-PI, but the only proforma AICTE supplies is a Co-PI sheet: PhDs guided, patents, publications split into thesis or book and journals, conferences attended, whether the person is serving or superannuated, and a signed declaration. The equipment list wants a specification, a number of units, the cost of a single unit and a written justification against each item, all of which are set out in the sample application form.

The fifth attachment is where the science gets argued. The brief of the research proposal covers project activities, schedule, relevance of the collaboration and the industrial and social outcomes, and the scheme document caps it at 500 words. Those 500 words carry a project whose justification is worth 45 of the 100 marks on the proforma cum evaluation sheet, entered separately on the portal's project justification tab.

The application is filed by the institution on the AICTE web portal, using credentials AICTE issued to the institute. There is no personal login and no offline route; the apply link sits on AICTE's Research and Innovations Development Schemes page next to the scheme documents.

The order of operations in the user manual is worth following exactly, because two steps lock behind earlier ones:

1. Open the CRS Application tab. Institute details auto-populate and cannot be edited; the institute adds its district, the percentage of grant it receives from government, PAN particulars and the reference of its extension of approval letter for the year.
2. Save the bank details, then confirm them. The New button that creates an application stays disabled until that confirmation happens, and bank details can no longer be edited once an application has been submitted.
3. Click New. A unique CRS Application ID is generated, and this is the step at which an unapproved course in the institute stops the application.
4. Select the PI from the TEQIP faculty list that opens on the selection icon, then create a record for each Co-PI under CRS Faculty Details. If the intended PI is not in that list, AICTE publishes a second, separate manual on the scheme page for adding a PI, which is the step that has to happen first.
5. Fill the tabs: scheme details, PI details, Co-PI 1 to 4, academic credentials, project justification, credentials of the institute or department, non-recurring budget, equipment already in the lab, recurring budget and attachments.
6. Run Validate Application. It reports any parameter left unfilled, and it refuses a second record for a parameter that already has one.

The area of the proposal is a closed list rather than free text. The sample application form sets out 10 options: energy, environment, climate change and sustainable habitat, healthcare, information and communication technology, advanced materials, nanotechnology hardware, manufacturing, security and defence, and water resources. A proposal that does not sit in one of those has a placement problem before it has a scientific one.

Tracking a submitted proposal works differently from a student scholarship portal, where a status bar is the norm. The application remains a record under the same institute login, addressed by its CRS Application ID, and the portal's toolbar carries a search function and a notification marker AICTE uses to write to the institute, both documented in the user manual. AICTE publishes no separate public status page for CRS. Outcomes have been announced as bulletins on the AICTE site instead, the way the Phase-I selection was announced on 18 June 2019, and anything more specific has to go through the CRS helpdesk.

CRS is scored, and AICTE publishes the score sheet. The proforma cum evaluation sheet is bound into the sample application form, which means an institute can mark its own draft honestly before submitting it.

Within the PI block the weights are specific enough to plan around. A PhD carries 10 marks; registered patents and membership of professional or learned bodies carry 5 each; national journal publications in the last three years carry 4 and international ones 2; teaching experience and research or industrial experience carry 2 each; state and national awards 2 each and an international award 1. A registered patent therefore counts for more on this sheet than three years of publishing in international journals, and the doctorate outweighs both.

The institute block is almost entirely about accreditation and completed work: research projects completed in the last five years, consultancy research projects completed in the last five years, the number of courses accredited in the institute, and whether the UG or PG course under which the proposal is submitted is accredited by NBA, at 5 marks each. The justification block puts 10 marks each on objectives and relevance, research methodology, technical novelty and utility, and possible patentability of the outcome, with 5 on the expected outcome. One row there is scored at nothing: the research status of the proposal is entered as national or international and no maximum mark is set against it.

The committee that applies all this is small and specified: three members not below the rank of Associate Professor, at least two of them from the concerned stream, with a fourth stepping in if one of the three is unavailable, per the scheme document. The same experts work down the budget line by line. The evaluation sheet gives them a yes or no, a number of units and an amount against every equipment row, so a recommended project can be sanctioned for less than it asked for.

The conditions are built around a single risk: the Principal Investigator leaving.

Association of Co-PI-1 is mandatory for exactly that reason. If the PI leaves the institution without transferring the project or goes on long leave, Co-PI-1 may continue with it, subject to the PI's consent and AICTE's approval, and the request has to reach AICTE in advance. If no co-investigator remains to carry the work, the project is terminated at that stage, the PI along with Co-PI-1 from the host institute submits a utilisation certificate, and no further grant is released. Both rules are in the scheme document.

The money conditions are equally literal. The institute opens a separate account in a nationalised bank for the CRS grant. The grant is used strictly for the purpose specified in the sanction letter. Re-appropriation between heads is not permitted. The equipment list decided by the experts is final and no changes are permitted afterwards, which is the practical argument for getting specifications right at proposal stage rather than at purchase stage.

AICTE publishes a CRS-specific technical line rather than routing queries through its general helpdesk. The number is 011-29581335 and the email is crsteqip@aicte-india.org, both listed against the scheme on the Research and Innovations Development Schemes page. AICTE's office is at Nelson Mandela Marg, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi 110070.

myScheme records CRS as a central sector scheme of the Department of Higher Education with an online application mode and no application URL of its own, which leaves the AICTE portal and that helpdesk as the only published route in. Two questions in particular belong there: whether a given institute counts as TEQIP-funded for the purpose of the scheme, and whether a call is currently open.