Financial Assistance For Purchase Of Stationery To SC/ST/OBC/Minorities Students(FAFPS)

Overview

About FAFPS

Financial Assistance for Purchase of Stationery to SC/ST/OBC/Minorities Students was a yearly cash payment from the Delhi government to school pupils from Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, Other Backward Class and minority families: Rs 1,000 in Classes I to VIII and Rs 2,000 in Classes IX to XII. It no longer runs under that name. The Delhi cabinet folded it into a combined stationery-and-merit scheme in July 2019, and the state's later Economic Survey treats that combined scheme as the forerunner of a Class IX to XII scholarship.

The grant belonged to Delhi's Department for the Welfare of SC/ST/OBC/Minorities, and its stated purpose was narrow: give poor pupils enough money for stationery that its cost would not weigh on parents sending a child to school. The Delhi Planning Department's chapter on the department tied it to the lower literacy rate among Scheduled Caste residents (Delhi Planning Department, SC/ST/OBC welfare chapter, 2019-20).

That gap is measurable. The 2011 Census figures reproduced in the Economic Survey of Delhi 2019-20 put literacy at 78.89% for Delhi's Scheduled Caste population against 86.20% for the city as a whole, and the same chapter records Rs 70.06 crore spent on the stationery grant in 2018-19 (Economic Survey of Delhi 2019-20, Chapter 17).

The scheme's separate life ended with cabinet decision no. 2707 of 2 July 2019, which merged it with the Class I to XII merit scholarship from 2019-20; the Planning Department's 2020-21 chapter lists the stationery grant as discontinued from that year (Delhi Planning Department, SC/ST/OBC welfare chapter, 2020-21). The Economic Survey of Delhi 2023-24 describes the Mukhyamantri Vidhyarthi Pratibha Yojana as the scheme "previously known as" that merged stationery-and-merit scheme, now confined to Classes IX to XII (Economic Survey of Delhi 2023-24, Chapter 17).

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

Windows were announced session by session, and the two on record, for 2016-17 and 2019-20, both opened on 1 December. The timeline runs from the grant's extension to primary classes to the year its budget was kept only for old dues.

The department's 2024-25 and 2025-26 guidelines do not list the grant at all, so a closing date quoted for it for a recent session has no footing in the department's own papers (2024-25 guidelines; 2025-26 guidelines).

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The class range and the income line both moved between the 2008-09 account and the merger. In 2008-09 the Economic Survey of Delhi described the grant as help for Classes VI to XII only, for families earning up to Rs 1 lakh a year (Economic Survey of Delhi 2008-09, welfare of SC/ST/OBC/Minorities). Primary pupils in Classes I to V were brought in from 2011-12, and the Planning Department's 2019-20 chapter lists National Open Schools alongside Central government, Delhi government, aided, recognised and local-body schools (Delhi Planning Department, 2019-20).

Two official accounts of the pre-2019 income test do not agree. The Planning Department's 2019-20 chapter applies the Rs 2 lakh ceiling to every applicant, as the scheme record does (Delhi Planning Department, 2019-20), while the Economic Survey of Delhi 2019-20 says no family income criterion applied to SC and ST students and limited the test to OBC and minority families (Economic Survey of Delhi 2019-20, Chapter 17).

The 2019 merger rewrote the tests. The combined scheme's guidelines raised the ceiling to Rs 3 lakh, removed the income limit altogether for a student who scored 75% or more in the previous class, and added minimum marks of 50% for Classes IX and X and 60% for Classes XI and XII, with none for Classes I to VIII (2019-20 scholarship guidelines, Department for the Welfare of SC/ST/OBC). Minority applicants also had to show three years' residence in Delhi.

From 2020-21 the department's guidelines are written for SC, ST and OBC students only, and e-District now lists the minority versions of its tuition fee and college merit schemes under the Department of Revenue (2020-21 guidelines; e-District Delhi, services).

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

The scheme record publishes no exclusion list, but the department's papers name three things that disqualified a claim. A student could not take this state grant together with a centrally sponsored scholarship, a rule the department's 2017-18 e-District instructions apply to all of its state schemes (instructions for students, 2017-18). Before the merger, attendance below 70% in the preceding year ruled a pupil out (Delhi Planning Department, SC/ST/OBC welfare chapter, 2017-18).

The third is partial. Under the 2019-20 terms, a pupil whose school already supplied stationery in cash or in kind lost the stationery half of the award and kept only the scholarship half, Rs 1,500, Rs 2,000 or Rs 2,500 a year depending on the class (2019-20 scholarship guidelines).

Continuation

Renewal conditions

The only renewal route on record dates from the first online years: the 2017-18 e-District instructions let students registered for 2016-17 opt for renewal cases the following session (instructions for students, 2017-18). Under the merged scheme, a student repeating a class was not eligible for that year (2019-20 scholarship guidelines).

What you get

Award & benefits

The yearly figures in the scheme record are monthly amounts added up. The Planning Department's chapter states the rate as Rs 100 a month for ten months in Classes I to VIII and Rs 200 a month for ten months in Classes XI and XII (Delhi Planning Department, 2019-20), and the Economic Survey of Delhi 2019-20 gives the annual Rs 2,000 for all of Classes IX to XII (Economic Survey of Delhi 2019-20, Chapter 17).

The table sets the three documented versions side by side.

In the merged scheme each award was split into two equal halves, one for stationery and one for merit, so the full sums were Rs 3,000, Rs 4,000 and Rs 5,000 a year (2019-20 scholarship guidelines). The successor's terms in the Economic Survey of Delhi 2023-24 carry no separate stationery half and begin at Class IX, so the Class I to VIII money has no continuation there (Economic Survey of Delhi 2023-24, Chapter 17).

• The amount of financial assistance is as followed: I to VIII class – Rs. 1000/- P.A.
• IX to XII class – Rs. 2000/- P.A.

What to prepare

Documents required

Under the merged scheme's 2019-20 guidelines, two lines of the record's checklist stopped meaning what they say. Where the record asks for an income certificate, those guidelines took a self-certified declaration on the application's own format, and where it asks for residence proof, a minority applicant could show an EPIC card, Aadhaar number, ration card, MTNL landline bill, GNCTD driving licence, SDM domicile certificate or a nationalised bank passbook. The same guidelines added two requirements the checklist leaves out: a bank account in the student's own name or held jointly with a parent, active and seeded with the student's Aadhaar, and, for minority families, a parent's declaration of community in a prescribed format (2019-20 scholarship guidelines).

The record's "verification letter" line matches a route the department's notice for the 2016-17 session reserved for Delhi residents studying at institutions outside Delhi, and only under its college merit scholarship and the OBC post-matric scholarship, not the school stationery scheme (public notice, 2016-17 session).

Step by step

How to apply

There is no live application route for this grant: it is missing both from the department's scheme list and from e-District's list of services open to apply for (services and schemes; e-District Delhi, services).

While it ran, the assistance was given through the principal of the pupil's school, and from the 2016-17 session the application itself moved online (Delhi Planning Department, 2017-18). The 2017-18 instructions told applicants to keep the system-generated login ID for monitoring the application, keep the acknowledgement receipt and give an active mobile number for status updates (instructions for students, 2017-18). Each school named a nodal officer to authenticate its pupils' applications, and payment went through PFMS against the student's Aadhaar number (public notice, 2016-17 session).

Tracking an Old Application or Payment

e-District's Track Your Application form still carries the grant under its own name, "Financial Assistance for purchase of Stationery to SC/ST/OBC/Minority Category", as a separate service from the merged Class I to XII scheme; the merged service's label adds that for the 2016-17, 2017-18 and 2018-19 sessions it was known as the Class I to XII merit scholarship (e-District Delhi, Track Your Application). For a stationery claim from those three sessions, the old name is the service to pick, with the application number printed on its acknowledgement. A DBT credit can be traced on the Public Financial Management System through its Know Your Payment link (PFMS).

The Planning Department's 2020-21 chapter kept Rs 100 lakh on the old stationery head that year for previous years' liabilities, so the head stayed open to settle earlier claims, not to take new ones (Delhi Planning Department, 2020-21).

How winners are picked

Selection process

The stationery money had no merit list: a pupil who met the category, income and school conditions qualified, and the marks thresholds added in 2019 were minimums, not a ranking. Nor were the yearly targets ceilings in practice, since the number of students covered ran above the target in six of the seven years the Planning Department's chapter shows (Delhi Planning Department, 2019-20).

The one year that fell short, 2016-17, was also the first year applications went online through e-District (Delhi Planning Department, 2019-20).

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The 2019-20 guidelines attach a condition that is easy to miss: the sanctioned amount was to be kept as a fixed deposit in the student's account until the student completed Class XII or reached 18, whichever came first (2019-20 scholarship guidelines).

The applicant carried responsibility for wrong or incomplete details entered on the portal (instructions for students, 2017-18).

Get help

Contact

A question about an unpaid claim from the years the grant ran goes to the office that issued its 2016-17 notice, the Department for the Welfare of SC/ST/OBC at Vikas Bhawan, I.P. Estate (public notice, 2016-17 session). Its contact page gives B-Block, 2nd Floor, Vikas Bhawan, I.P. Estate, New Delhi-110002 and the helpline 011-23379512 (contact page). The department has also set up a 1031 call centre to guide applicants on its e-District schemes (Economic Survey of Delhi 2023-24, Chapter 17).

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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