Distance Education Scheme for Girls(DESG)

The rules fix an annual cycle but no calendar date, and the department announces each year's window by a short notification instead. The 2025-26 round is the documented example of what that looks like in practice.

A closing date that moves once is normal here. The 2025-26 window shut later than first published, and the objection round that followed it ran on into the next July, which is the gap between applying and being paid that nobody plans for.

The rules carry no age limit at all, which puts a woman coming back to study long after she left school on exactly the same footing as a girl who has just finished it. They also set a preference order that runs opposite to intuition: postgraduate applicants are considered first, then undergraduate, then diploma, then certificate courses. A fixed share of each year's fund for new students is reserved for undergraduates at the same time, so the levels are both ranked against one another and funded apart (scheme rules).

One institutional condition disqualifies more applicants than any personal one. The university or college has to be registered and its details updated on the scholarship portal before its students can file anything, and the Commissionerate has placed that duty on the registrar or the principal, warning that students of an institution which has not done it will simply be unable to apply online (order opening the scholarship portal). A girl who cannot find her university in the portal's list has an institutional problem, not a personal one.

No separate list of exclusions is published here. What shuts an applicant out is written into the eligibility and target-group clauses instead, and it is worth reading them that way round. Regular-mode students are outside it, and so is any institution beyond the state-funded universities of Rajasthan holding recognition under sections 2(f) and 12(B) of the UGC Act, plus IGNOU. A girl already drawing a state fee reimbursement for the same period is not excluded outright but is paid only the difference between the two, and a girl whose distance-education course is covered by the Social Justice Department's post-matric scheme is paid through that department's existing process rather than under DE-HE.

The rules add one line in the opposite direction that is easy to miss: holding a prize or incentive scholarship does not shut a girl out, and the rules separately record that girls who are outstanding in studies will receive incentives or prizes (scheme rules).

Renewal is an act, not a default. The reimbursement carries into the next year of study only on receipt of a renewal application and on satisfactory academic performance, and two events end it outright. Not moving up to the next class or level ends the benefit for good. So does a change of course, from the date of that change, because a change of course is not permitted under the scheme at all (scheme rules). Switching from a BA to a BCom mid-way, a routine decision in open learning, ends the support for the remainder of the programme.

The scheme fixes no per-student amount, because the benefit is defined as the fee the institution actually charged, for the full duration of the course. That makes the fee receipt the document the payment is computed from rather than one more attachment, and two girls sitting in the same class can be reimbursed very different sums.

The payment runs from the date of joining the course as certified by the university, arrives annually by direct benefit transfer, and is conditional each year on academic performance. Nothing beyond the fee is payable, so there is no maintenance allowance, no book grant and no lump sum attached to it (scheme rules).

The list itself is published with the scheme record. The item on it that decides whether the money ever lands is the Jan Aadhaar card. The Commissionerate's opening order tells applicants to make sure that caste, place of origin and bank details are already correct and updated inside Jan Aadhaar before the form is filled, because the form is populated from that family record (order opening the scholarship portal). A bank entry that has gone stale there is not a clerical detail on this form; it is the field the transfer depends on.

The non-judicial stamp paper in the list serves one purpose too, and it is worth understanding before buying it: it carries the declaration that no other department is paying for the same course.

Applications are invited once a year, in a single window, under one category, Distance Education-Higher Education (scheme rules). That window is not the scheme's own. The Commissionerate opens this scheme on the same order, and on the same dates, as eight other Rajasthan scholarship and scooty schemes for the year, so the closing date a distance learner is watching is the department's common one rather than anything published for her scheme alone (order opening the scholarship portal). Incomplete applications are rejected after scrutiny, and an application the university has not verified is not considered for reimbursement, so a submitted form is only the first half of the job (scheme rules).

Tracking a file here means watching for an objection rather than a payment stage. Objections raised by the screening college are posted back on the scholarship portal, and they arrive in bulk rather than one at a time: for the 2025-26 round the list circulated with Vardhman Mahaveer Open University's notice ran to 1,410 postgraduate and diploma applications, and each student named on it had to sign back in, read the objection recorded against her and upload what it asked for by 10 July 2026, after which the notice states the Commissionerate can cancel the application and that the consequence rests with the student herself (objection notice for the 2025-26 applications, Vardhman Mahaveer Open University).

Selection is not a merit rank. Preference runs by level of study rather than by marks, a fixed share of each year's fund for new students is reserved for undergraduates, the order caps intake level by level in a table at its foot, and it also provides that the total number of seats is settled by the fund available that year (scheme rules). Two girls with identical files can be separated by nothing except the level they are studying at and how much of the year's fund is left when their file is reached. Verification does the rest of the filtering, since only files the institution has cleared reach the department.

The award is annual and conditional, not a settled entitlement, and it is calculated from the date of joining as certified by the university. Nothing beyond the fee is payable under it. Where a rule is read two ways, the Additional Chief Secretary, Principal Secretary or Secretary of the Higher Education Department is the final authority on interpretation, and the department both implements and monitors the scheme, which means a disputed reading is settled inside that department rather than by the university that raised it (scheme rules).

For anything about a specific application, the first stop is the institution the girl is enrolled in, because it is the body that verifies her file. Above it sit the two nodal colleges the Commissionerate addresses for this scheme, Government Arts Girls College, Kota and Government Girls College, Kishanpol, Jaipur, which screen what the universities send up and raise the objections on it (objection notice, Vardhman Mahaveer Open University).

The Department of College Education itself sits at Block IV, Dr S Radhakrishnan Shiksha Sankul, Jawahar Lal Nehru Marg, Jaipur 302015, and publishes 0141-2706106 as its number (Higher and Technical Education, Rajasthan); the scheme's rules and the state's other college scholarship rules stay on its online scholarship page (Department of College Education).