Dr. Baba Saheb Ambedkar Loan for Higher Study in Foreign Countries(DBSALHSIFC)

Overview

About DBSALHSIFC

Gujarat's Director of Scheduled Caste Welfare runs this as scheme BCK-15, and what it hands over is credit: Rs. 15 lakhs to a Scheduled Caste student leaving for a course abroad, priced at 4% interest, recovered afterwards to the last rupee, as the directorate publishes the pattern of assistance. The order of recovery is the clause to read twice, because the directorate takes the principal back first and only then starts collecting the interest, in the terms on its own scheme page.

Marks are the easy part of qualifying. The obstacle sits behind the applicant: somebody's land has to be valued and pledged before a Deputy Director will move the file at all.

There is no corporation and no bank anywhere in this arrangement. The directorate lists the scheme under its own code, BCK-15, among its educational schemes, on its English scheme page. It is administered by the Director, Scheduled Caste Welfare inside Gujarat's Social Justice and Empowerment Department, the implementing office is the Deputy Director of the applicant's own district, and the money is state money budgeted under the Scheduled Castes Sub Plan rather than refinance drawn from a national apex lender, as the directorate sets the scheme out. It has been running since 1999.

What the loan is allowed to pay for is itemised in that Sub Plan: tuition fees, books, hostels, expenses, travel expenses and pocket money, for graduate, postgraduate and diploma courses, up to Rs. 15.00 lakhs per student, in the department's own plan document.

The same entry records how many students actually get it, which is a smaller number than the ceiling suggests.

Those figures belong to the plan year that document covers and are the latest the department has put out in English. They describe the scheme's working size, not a quota still open this year.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

The dates that matter here are the applicant's own. No closing date appears on the scheme's public record, which carries an opening date and no end to it, and the directorate advertises no dated round for this loan the way the Developing Castes directorate advertises the foreign study loan it runs for other categories.

What stands in for a deadline is the passport stamp. The student is expected to apply before leaving India, as the directorate states the timing, and the January 2022 resolution added a fallback letting a student who has already gone apply within six months of departure, in the clause it inserted. Put together, the workable window opens when the visa and ticket exist and shuts six months after the flight.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The applicant has to be a native of Gujarat and to belong to the state's Scheduled Caste category, as the directorate lists the criteria. After that the test is academic rather than financial: 50% at Std. XII opens diploma and equivalent technical and professional courses abroad, 50% at graduation level opens postgraduate study, and the directorate applies no income ceiling of any kind, in the eligibility criteria as published in English. Families who assume a welfare scheme must have a means test talk themselves out of this one.

Course length is where the rulebook moved, and the official summaries have not all moved with it. A resolution of the Social Justice and Empowerment Department dated 2 June 2022 rewrote the duration clause so that diploma, graduate, postgraduate and PhD study abroad qualifies when the course runs for a year or longer, or for at least two semesters, in the amending resolution the scheme page itself lists. The reason given in the order is blunt: under the previous wording a course lasting exactly a year could not be sanctioned at all. The directorate's own scheme page still prints that previous wording, and so does the record shown on this page, so a taught master's built on two semesters is inside the scheme today while the summaries a student is most likely to find say it is not.

Family size is the other clause with a stale copy in circulation. The restriction of the benefit to a single child per Scheduled Caste family was cancelled and replaced with a limit of two persons from one family by the resolution of 3 January 2022 that amends the original conditions, yet the question-and-answer sheet hosted on the application portal still answers with the old single-child rule, in the sheet as it stands. A second sibling should get that settled in writing at the district office before the family pays a valuer.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

No separate disqualification list is published, so what rules an applicant out has to be assembled from the conditions. A course below the duration floor does not qualify. A third person from one family does not. Nor does an institution its own government has not recognised, or a degree that country does not accept, under the recognition condition the directorate sets.

Sequence knocks out more files than any of those. Sanction proceedings begin only after the visa and the air ticket have both been produced, which means an admission letter, however good, starts nothing.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

There is no annual re-application and no renewal form. A single sanction covers the whole course, and what the borrower owes afterwards is not paperwork but money on a schedule, plus a standing duty to keep the office told where they are.

What you get

Award & benefits

The ceiling is Rs. 15 lakhs and the rate is 4%, as the pattern of assistance states. One rate applies to every borrower; nothing in the scheme's documents carries a lower rate for women, and nothing converts any slice of the principal into a grant.

Disbursement is not tranched. The scheme's question-and-answer sheet on the e-Samaj Kalyan portal states that the loan is paid over at one go rather than year by year, in the sheet the portal publishes. A student who plans on a second-year instalment arriving is planning on something the scheme does not do.

Recovery begins six months after the student finishes the course and has to be complete within ten years, and the interest is collected only once the principal has been paid off, in the recovery terms the directorate publishes. Read that ordering carefully before budgeting: the early years of the schedule retire principal, the interest sits behind it untouched, and a borrower who clears the principal and assumes the account is shut still has a bill coming.

The rate is fixed by government resolution rather than benchmarked to anybody's lending rate, and no bank stands between the directorate and the borrower. The cheapness is real. So are the conditions attached to it, and they are set out below.

• Under this scheme, a loan of ₹15 lakhs is provided at an interest rate of 4% to the eligible students.

What to prepare

Documents required

The application form asks for more than the headline checklist implies, and one line in it decides most files. Directly under its guarantor heading, before any of the property blocks, sits a note fixing the security: the property offered has to be worth at least Rs.15.00 lakh in total, on a government-approved valuer's report, in the form the directorate publishes. That floor equals the maximum loan, so a family whose only asset is a modest house is out before the marks are looked at.

How many people have to pledge property is genuinely unsettled between the directorate's own documents. The scheme page now says one sound surety, in the conditions as they currently read, because the January 2022 resolution replaced the requirement of two sound sureties with one, in the amending order. The form has not been reprinted since: it still lays out property blocks for the guardian and for two separate guarantors, and its document schedule still demands, for each of them, a surety bond on stamp paper in the Annexure-C format, a valuation report and recent 7/12 land records, in the form as currently hosted. The portal's question sheet sides with the form and answers that two sound sureties are required, in that sheet. Take the resolution to the counter and ask which one the district is working to, because the difference is a second family's land.

Two questions on the form are easy to skim past and both are judged. It asks what the whole course abroad will cost and how the applicant intends to cover the part the loan will not, and it asks whether the university has offered a scholarship or fellowship and how that would be paid out.

Step by step

How to apply

The route in is the e-Samaj Kalyan portal, the department's single window for its welfare schemes, which runs the sequence as register, then log in and complete the profile, then apply for the scheme, then submit, as the portal itself lays out the steps. The signed paper file follows the online submission to the Deputy Director, Scheduled Caste Welfare of the applicant's district, which is the office the form is addressed to.

No separate tracking system exists for this loan. What the portal gives you instead is a Your Application Status link sitting beside the citizen login on its front page, and that single view is the whole of the published position on where a file has reached; when it yields nothing, the district officers the directorate names are the only other route.

There is also a statutory clock on the decision, and almost nobody invokes it. The department notified this loan as a service under the Gujarat (Right of Citizens to Public Services) Act, 2013, and set against it a stipulated time limit longer than the one it fixed for the directorate's scholarship services. The appendix carrying that limit is a printed English table with no machine-readable text behind it, so the number of days has to be read off the row that names this loan, in the notification as published. A file still sitting past that limit is one you are entitled to chase in writing, on the Act.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Nothing is marked and nobody is ranked. Sanctions are issued in the order applications reach the office, with applicants from the most backward castes among the Scheduled Castes taken first, under the rule the January 2022 resolution inserted.

Order of receipt is only half of it, because sanction is also subject to funds remaining in the year's provision. Against a scheme that reaches a few hundred students annually, that turns submission date into the real selection criterion: a complete file lodged early behaves nothing like the same file lodged late.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The clause with the sharpest teeth is about where the borrower ends up living. If the beneficiary settles abroad, the loan together with its interest becomes repayable to the State Government in a single lump sum, and the resolution states in terms that no concession will be allowed in that event, in the condition as it now reads.

Liability then travels outward. Where the borrower fails to pay, the amount is recovered from the guarantors in equal shares, and where the guarantors fail to pay, it is recovered from them as arrears of land revenue, in the same amended condition. That last phrase is why standing surety here is heavier than co-signing at a bank: arrears of land revenue are collected by the revenue machinery, against the property, without anybody having to sue first.

One duty outlives the course itself. A borrower who settles abroad has to report any change of workplace or residence, contact number and email address, and any travel to India, for as long as the loan remains unpaid, in the condition the directorate publishes.

The same January 2022 resolution also struck something out. The old requirement to serve in India for five years after finishing the course was deleted, so taking a job overseas is no longer a breach on its own; only settling there pulls the recall clause.

Get help

Contact

Head office for the scheme is Dr. Jivraj Mehta Bhavan in Gandhinagar, where the Director, Scheduled Caste Welfare occupies Block number 4 on the 2nd Floor; the published email there is dir-dscw@gujarat.gov.in, alongside the head office and branch numbers.

A live file, though, sits with the Deputy Director, Scheduled Caste Welfare of the district, and that same page carries the district-by-district list of those officers with their email addresses. For the loan specifically, the head office desk is the G-1 Education branch, which the page lists with its own number and email.

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.

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References

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