Combined Merit Scholarship(CMS-G)

Overview

About CMS-G

Assam's Directorate of Higher Education keeps a single Scholarships page, and it offers a student exactly two things: an Apply Now button and a downloadable copy of the Combined Merit advertisement, in the directorate's scholarships page. The button opens a portal whose newest notice still asks Combined Merit PG applicants to upload a marksheet by 15-02-2022, per the older scholarship portal. The downloadable advertisement is the one drafted for the session 2018-2019, in the directorate's advertisement. The round the directorate last actually ran, advertised for 2025-26, went out on a different site under a different heading, per the 2025-26 notice, and it does not say the same things.

Combined in the name joins two awards, not two streams and not two boards. The directorate's advertisement is headed Combined Merit (Degree and Master) Scholarship Scheme, and the Higher Education Department's scholarship table lists the two halves as separate rows, Combined Merit Scholarship (Degree) and Combined Merit Scholarship (Master Degree), each with its own monthly rate, in the department's scholarship table and in the directorate's advertisement. One notice, one online form and one closing date cover both. What changes between them is the examination the marks are read from and the amount that reaches the account.

Four things separate the two texts a student is likely to meet. The advertisement drafted for 2025-26 is headed for male students only and sets the undergraduate rate at Rs 450 a month, in the circulated 2025-26 advertisement. The copy on the directorate's downloads page carries no gender clause anywhere, names Rs 300 a month for the degree course, opens the scheme to any recognised institution and makes the Permanent Resident Certificate a mandatory eligibility document, in the 2018-19 advertisement. The postgraduate rate, Rs 500 a month, is the one figure that has not moved. Both documents are the directorate's own words; only one of them describes a round a student could have applied against.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

The 2025-26 round ran on a short calendar with three fixed points.

No later window is advertised on the site students are sent to. The directorate's operations home page still carries a single scholarship line telling students to click the link to apply for Combined Merit Scholarship 2025-26, per the DHE operations site, and the window it points at closed in November 2025.

The window is short, and it has moved. The 2018-19 advertisement opened its applications during September and gave institutions until 10 October 2018 to send the paperwork in, per the 2018-19 advertisement. By 2025 the same three stages had shifted into November and early December. A first-semester student who watches only September will miss it.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The marks bar is 60 percent, read from a different examination depending on which half of the award is wanted: the Higher Secondary Final Year result for the Combined Merit Degree Scholarship, and the General Degree course result for the Combined Merit Master Degree Scholarship, per the 2025-26 notice.

Where the student studies matters as much as the percentage. For 2025-26 the directorate limited the award to male students in the 1st Semester of a General Degree or General Master Degree course in the Arts, Science or Commerce disciplines, at a provincialised or government college or a State or Central university of Assam, naming the session 2024-25 in the eligibility clause even though the notice itself is headed 2025-26, per the 2025-26 notice. Three of that notice's eligibility clauses spell out the male student: the one about course and college, the one about domicile and the one about the bank account. The 2018-19 advertisement asked only for a general degree or master degree course in any recognised institution, which is a much wider door. A student at a private college, or at a college outside the state, needs to read the clause in the notice being applied against rather than a general description of the scheme.

Assam domicile is the other fixed test, and how it is proved has shifted. The 2018-19 advertisement wrote the Permanent Resident Certificate into the eligibility clause as mandatory; the 2025-26 clause says only that the male student must be a domicile of Assam, and the PRC does not appear in that round's list of documents, in the notice and the circulated advertisement. Keeping the PRC ready is still the safer reading, because the domicile requirement itself never went away.

No income ceiling appears in either advertisement, and no income certificate is asked for in either document list. Merit and the year's budget decide this one.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

Neither advertisement publishes a list of who is barred, but two clauses do that work. The eligibility clause confines the award to general degree and master degree courses in Arts, Science and Commerce, which leaves engineering, medicine, law and the other professional streams outside it, and the last clause states that an application that is incomplete, carries misinformation or gives an inactive account number is subject to cancellation, per the 2025-26 notice.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Read the heading of either advertisement and the answer is in the first line: both are headed as an advertisement for awarding scholarship (FRESH), and the merit lists the directorate has posted carry the same word in their titles, in the 2018-19 advertisement, the circulated 2025-26 advertisement and the directorate's merit lists page. Neither document carries a renewal form, a renewal window, or a marks bar a continuing student has to hold, and neither says for how many years a selected student keeps drawing the money. The course-length runs quoted in scheme summaries appear in no advertisement the directorate has published.

What the directorate has asked of students already holding the award is narrower and more specific: its older scholarship portal instructed applicants to the Combined Merit Scholarship for PG to log in and upload their UG final semester marksheet by 15-02-2022, per the scholarship portal. That is a document the postgraduate award waits on after selection, not a second application.

What you get

Award & benefits

The monthly rate depends on the course level and on which advertisement is in force.

How many students the award reaches is a budget question. Neither advertisement fixes a number of awards, and the only volumes on the record are the beneficiary counts the Higher Education Department published for two budget years, against a provision of 25.00 lakh on the degree line.

Those counts describe the budget years named in the table and nothing more recent, and they sit well above the award totals quoted in scheme summaries, which no advertisement supports. The rate history in the same table is worth holding onto: the degree award doubled from Rs 150 to Rs 300 a month across those two budget years and reached Rs 450 by the 2025-26 advertisement, while the master degree rate has stayed at Rs 500 since 2017-2018.

The award is paid by DBT, which makes the bank details load-bearing rather than administrative. The 2025-26 notice asks for an active, up-to-date account in the student's own name, preferably with the State Bank of India, with the bank name, account number, branch name and IFSC code entered on the application, per the 2025-26 notice.

• Financial Assistance
• For Degree Courses: ₹300/- per month.
• For Master Degree Courses: ₹500/- per month.
• The scheme provides 200 scholarships for degree students (three years duration) and 100 scholarships for master degree students (two years duration).
• Selection: Based on merit and budget allocation.
• Coverage: Students pursuing general degree and master degree courses in Arts, Science, and Commerce disciplines.
• Mode of Disbursement
• Mode: Direct Benefit Transfer system.
• Conditions: Subject to selection by the selection committee and financial sanction approval.
• Conditions for Availment
• The applicant must maintain enrollment in the respective degree or master's degree course throughout the scholarship period.
• Academic performance standards must be maintained as per institutional and scheme requirements.
• Regular attendance and compliance with all institutional rules and regulations.
• Bank account must remain active and updated for Direct Benefit Transfer disbursement.

What to prepare

Documents required

The 2025-26 round asks for five items, one of them marked mandatory: a certificate from the Registrar or Head of the institution where the candidate is currently studying, which is the mandatory one, a photocopy of the first page of an active bank account, the final marksheet of the last qualifying examination, meaning Higher Secondary or the undergraduate degree, a photograph and signature of the candidate, and an Aadhaar card, per the circulated 2025-26 advertisement.

Set that against the older list, which opened with the PRC issued by a Deputy Commissioner or Sub Divisional Officer as proof of domicile and asked for no Aadhaar card and no bank passbook page, in the 2018-19 advertisement. Two documents have entered the list and one has left it, which is the sort of drift worth checking against the live notice rather than against a summary.

Step by step

How to apply

Applications are made online on the directorate's operations site. The 2025-26 notice sends applicants to a path labelled pg-scholarship-2025-26, and the page that opens there is headed PG Research Scholarship 2025-26 while carrying the Combined Merit Scholarship eligibility clauses word for word, in the application page. Landing on a heading that names a different scholarship is not a wrong turn on this portal.

After final submission, the printed copy of the online form goes to the Registrar, Principal or Head of the institute with the necessary copies of certificates and documents. A committee constituted at college or university level compiles and verifies the form and the documents, and the institution then submits the valid applications with a statement, under its seal and signature, to the Directorate of Higher Education, Assam, Kahilipara, Guwahati-781019, per the 2025-26 notice. The college is a mandatory stage, not a courtesy: an online submission that never reaches the directorate on paper goes nowhere.

A word on where the 2025-26 text quoted throughout comes from, because it is not on a .gov.in address. The directorate's own site still offers only the older PDF, so the readable copy of the current round is the file the directorate circulated to institutions, posted on the notice board of D.H.S.K. Commerce College in Dibrugarh. It opens with the covering letter, ECF No. 672324/2, signed by the Joint Director of Higher Education and addressed to the Director of Information and Public Relation, Assam, asking that the draft advertisement for UG and PG male students for the year 2025-26 be published in all leading dailies of the state for wide publicity, in the circulated advertisement. Nothing in it is second-hand: it carries the directorate's letterhead, its file number and its signature block, and a college simply put it on the web where the directorate did not. For a scheme whose window opens and closes inside a fortnight, those state dailies are a real second channel.

Tracking runs on the result rather than on the file. The advertisement says the list of selected beneficiaries will be notified on the same portal page, so there is no reference number and no status screen between submission and the published list, per the circulated advertisement. The directorate's document repository keeps a Merit Scholarship Merit lists page, and the Combined Merit Scholarship (Fresh) files posted there are for 2019-20, per the merit lists page. For money that has been sanctioned but has not arrived, the account named on the form is where the credit lands, which makes an inactive or mistyped account the first thing to raise with the college office.

How winners are picked

Selection process

One clause of the advertisement is the whole rule: selection will be made strictly on the basis of merit in all cases, and also to be restricted as per budget allocation, per the 2025-26 notice. Two things follow from it. Ranking is on the qualifying percentage alone, with no test, no interview and no weighting for anything else. And the line is drawn wherever the year's sanction runs out, which is why the directorate publishes a floor of 60 percent and never a cut-off. A percentage that clears the floor is not the same as a percentage that clears the list, and the notice never suggests otherwise.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

Three conditions carry real consequences for a selected student. The bank account has to be active and in the student's own name, preferably with the State Bank of India, because there is no alternative route for the money. The number of awards is capped by the year's budget allocation rather than fixed as a standing quota, so clearing the marks bar is necessary and not sufficient. And the dates are hard in a way both advertisements print in capitals: applications in any form, soft copy or hard copy, will not be entertained after the stipulated dates, in the 2018-19 advertisement and the circulated 2025-26 advertisement. The newer round adds the cancellation clause for an incomplete or inaccurate form on top of it.

Get help

Contact

The directorate sits at Kahilipara, Guwahati-781019, and the 2025-26 notice lists dhe-asm@nic.in and directorhigherassam123@gmail.com as its addresses, per the notice. Its older scholarship portal, still online, adds a Kahilipara telephone line on +91-361-2382286, an AMTRON-operated call centre on 18003451100 with helpdesk.amtron@gmail.com for portal faults, and a directorate mobile number, +91-98640-66978, per the scholarship portal.

Inside a college, the Registrar, Principal or Head of the institution is the officer who actually forwards a file to Kahilipara, so an application that has gone quiet is a question for that office before it is a question for the directorate.

Source

Official links

Frequently asked questions

From the official scheme FAQ (myScheme)

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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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