Financial Assistance to ST Students under "Gagan Bharari Shiksha Yojana"(FASTS-GBSY)

Overview

About FASTS-GBSY

Gagan Bharari Shiksha Yojana is not a scholarship a Scheduled Tribe student in Goa wins instead of the Post Matric Scholarship. It rides on top of it, because the Directorate of Tribal Welfare decided the central maintenance allowance does not cover what a Goan student actually spends getting to class and eating there. The rate now stands at Rs 900 a month for a day scholar and Rs 1,800 a month for a hosteller, paid across ten months of the academic year, with a further Rs 900 a month where the student has a disability certificate (Gagan Bharari Shiksha Yojana for ST Students, Chief Minister Scholarship Portal).

The scheme belongs to the Directorate of Tribal Welfare, Goa, and only to it. Goa runs three schemes with almost this name: the Social Welfare directorate operates a Gagan Bharari Shiksha Yojana for SC students and another for OBC (Dhangar) students, both at Rs 750 a month for a day scholar and Rs 1,500 for a hosteller, which is why a search for the ST version keeps returning pages about the SC one (category wise list of eligible schemes).

Size separates them more sharply than the rates do. Tribal Welfare recorded 3,393 applications under Gagan Bharari Shiksha Yojana in 2022-2023 and 4,135 in 2023-2024, against 23 applications on the SC track and 42 on the OBC (Dhangar) track in 2023-2024 (category wise statistics of various schemes). On that same table only the Pre Matric Scholarship Scheme, at 7,461 ST applications in 2023-2024, moves more Tribal Welfare files than Gagan Bharari does.

Its legal spine is a 2012 notification, No. DTW/STAT/2012-13/571, published in the Official Gazette Series I No. 29 on 18-10-2012, since amended four times. The live text of the eligibility clause and the application clause comes from the amendment the Directorate notified on 25 January 2022 and published in Series I No. 51 of 17 March 2022, which rewrote Clause 4 and Clause 7 and deleted Clause 10 outright (Amendment to Scheme Gagan Bharari Shiksha Yojana, Official Gazette of Goa). Clause 6 had already gone in November 2020. What survives is a lean instrument: a top-up, an income bar, and one year of it per class.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

Both date fields on the scheme record are blank. The window comes instead from the Directorate's numbered annual circular, issued with the approval of the Government, and the portal then posts the Tribal Welfare stages on its front page on a calendar that runs separately from the Social Welfare one printed beside it (Directorate of Tribal Welfare circular; important dates, Chief Minister Scholarship Portal).

The Directorate's circular for the same year had set the submission cutoff earlier, at 15 October 2025, and had put both verification stages earlier than the portal now carries them, so every closing date on that table is an extension of the one the Directorate issued (Directorate of Tribal Welfare circular). Extending this window is habitual rather than exceptional: the Directorate's circulars page carries standalone extension notices for Gagan Bharari Shiksha Yojana and the Merit Based Award in more than one year (Circulars, Department of Tribal Welfare). Treat the first date announced as the working deadline and the extension as luck.

One asymmetry is worth watching. The Directorate's circulars page currently carries a Centrally Sponsored Post Matric Scholarship circular for AY 2026-27, while the most recent Gagan Bharari circular listed there remains the one issued for AY 2025-26 (Circulars, Department of Tribal Welfare). The top-up notice follows the Post Matric notice rather than leading it.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Four conditions decide it, and the first is the one applicants underrate. You have to be eligible for the Centrally Sponsored Post Matric Scholarship for ST students in the current academic year, which is a separate application filed on the National Scholarship Portal, not on Goa's own portal. The Directorate's circular puts that condition at the top of its own eligibility list, ahead of the caste and income tests (Gagan Bharari Shiksha Yojana and Merit Based Award circular, Directorate of Tribal Welfare).

The other three are the gazette's Clause 4 as amended: Scheduled Tribe community in the State of Goa, parents' or guardians' income not above Rs 5.00 lakh a year, and regular full-time enrolment at a recognised institution or university.

Two ceilings are in play and they are not the same number. The centrally sponsored Post Matric Scholarship works to an income limit of Rs 2.5 lakh, while Gagan Bharari admits a family up to Rs 5.00 lakh, a point the state portal answers directly in its own FAQ (Chief Minister Scholarship Portal FAQ). A family between those two figures should read the Directorate's circular closely before assuming the top-up is reachable.

The repeat rule is absolute. The scholarship is available for one year in any given class, so a student who repeats a class cannot draw it a second time in that same class.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

The scheme record carries no exclusion list, but the state portal publishes one cross-scheme bar in its FAQ: a student who has applied for the Diamond Jubilee scheme in the current academic year cannot avail Gagan Bharari in that year (Chief Minister Scholarship Portal FAQ).

A Scheduled Caste or OBC (Dhangar) student in Goa is not shut out of Gagan Bharari money either. Their versions of the scheme sit under the Directorate of Social Welfare and pay Rs 750 a month to a day scholar and Rs 1,500 to a hosteller. What they cannot do is file here, because the Tribal Welfare list asks for a Scheduled Tribes certificate issued by the competent authority (category wise list of eligible schemes).

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Renewal here means filing again for a new year of study, not a continuation the Directorate rolls forward on its own. Because the award is capped at one year per class, the student who renews is the student who has moved up.

The Directorate does thin the paperwork the second time. Its circular cuts the renewal upload to five items against the nine a fresh file carries: the preceding year's mark sheet or passing certificate, the income certificate for the year, the hostel fee receipt where the student is a hosteller, the receipt for the current year's admission fees, and a disability certificate only where the disability allowance is being claimed (Directorate of Tribal Welfare circular). The portal prints the same renewal list with the hostel receipt missing from it, so a hosteller is better off uploading that receipt anyway (Gagan Bharari Shiksha Yojana for ST Students, Chief Minister Scholarship Portal). The file goes to the institute, the Nodal Officer there completes the verification, and the Directorate processes it from that point.

What you get

Award & benefits

Every rate here is a monthly one, which matters because the ten-month academic year is what caps the total.

The disability allowance is the one component the circular tells the institution to chase rather than wait for. It notes that a student with disability is entitled to an additional benefit of Rs 9000, and asks Nodal Officers to identify such students in their respective institutes and inform them (Directorate of Tribal Welfare circular).

Older figures still circulate widely. The Directorate's 2022 Citizen's Charter put the benefit at Rs 7,500 for a day scholar and Rs 15,000 for a hosteller across ten months, with no disability component at all (Citizen's Charter 2022, Department of Tribal Welfare). Those are the numbers most scheme listings still repeat. The current rates are higher on both counts.

• An Additional Maintenance Allowance of ₹ 7,500/- to Day Scholars for 10 Months.
• An Additional Maintenance Allowance of ₹ 15,000/- to Hostellers for 10 Months.

What to prepare

Documents required

Everything is uploaded, and no single file may exceed 200 kb, which is the practical constraint families hit first when a college office scans a certificate at full resolution (Gagan Bharari Shiksha Yojana for ST Students, Chief Minister Scholarship Portal).

Three items on the current fresh list are absent from the gazette's Clause 7, which is the version most scheme listings still mirror, and each one stops a file that otherwise looks complete. Clause 7 asks for an attested copy of the bank pass book; the current list wants that account seeded with Aadhaar, and recommends a national bank account. Clause 7 asks for an attested copy of the Aadhaar card; the current list also wants an Aadhaar consent form verified by the recognised institution or university, not merely signed at home. And Clause 7 asks only for the hostel receipt; the current list adds the receipt for the current year's admission fees as a separate item, so a day scholar still owes one receipt (Directorate of Tribal Welfare circular; Amendment to Scheme Gagan Bharari Shiksha Yojana, Official Gazette of Goa).

The mark sheet the Directorate wants is for the exam passed in the preceding academic year, and the disability certificate is required only from a student applying for the disability allowance.

Step by step

How to apply

Applications run on the Chief Minister Scholarship Portal at cmscholarship.goa.gov.in, and have since 2022-23. The Directorate is blunt that no manual forms will be accepted under the scheme (Directorate of Tribal Welfare circular). That is a real change from the gazette's Clause 7, which still describes a form submitted to the Directorate through the Head of the Educational Institution.

Registration is one time, and the account it creates reaches every department on the portal, so an ST student already registered for the Tribal Welfare pre-matric or nursing scheme opens the Gagan Bharari form from that same login rather than starting again (Chief Minister Scholarship Portal). What the account will not do is move the form. An uploaded application still has to be submitted to the institute, because the Directorate's timetable starts counting at the Nodal Officer there, and that officer has nothing to open until the student pushes the file across.

Tracking the Application and the Payment

The portal's front-page tracker reports one academic year at a time, so a student chasing a Gagan Bharari file has to ask it about the year the file was raised under (Chief Minister Scholarship Portal). What comes back is a position in a two-desk chain rather than a yes or a no. INO level verification comes first and district level after it, each with its own deadline in the Tribal Welfare calendar, so a file the institute has already cleared is not yet a file the Directorate has processed.

Where the tracker shows a cleared application and the money has still not arrived, the circular names one cause ahead of any other: submitting details of an Aadhaar-seeded bank account is mandatory, and the payment will not be credited if the Aadhaar is not seeded to the bank account (Directorate of Tribal Welfare circular). Seeding is done at the bank, not on the portal, and the portal's downloads section carries the Aadhaar linking form for it (Chief Minister Scholarship Portal).

How winners are picked

Selection process

There is no benchmark percentage and no ranking. The circular that carries Gagan Bharari sets rank-holder felicitation and marks slabs immediately below it, for the Merit Based Award, and sets nothing of the kind for this scheme, whose only tests are the eligibility conditions and the verification chain (Directorate of Tribal Welfare circular).

A submitted application is verified first by the Nodal Officer appointed at the institution, then at district level, before the Directorate processes payment. The circular asks the Nodal Officers appointed in every school to verify each application promptly to avoid further difficulties, and gives their stage and the district stage separate dated deadlines (Directorate of Tribal Welfare circular).

The merit contest students confuse this with is the Merit Based Award, announced in the same circular and open to the same ST students on the strength of SSC and HSSC board performance. It is a different scheme with different money.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The award is a single year in any one class. The 2022 amendment rewrote Clause 4 and Clause 7 and deleted Clause 10, and Clause 6 had gone in 2020, which leaves the gazette carrying the eligibility test in Clause 4 and, in Clause 7, an application route the portal has since overtaken. What a student actually has to satisfy is the amended Clause 4 plus the conditions the year's circular attaches.

Three of those circular conditions bind in practice. Documents are accepted only in digital format and only under 200 kb. The bank account has to be Aadhaar-seeded or the payment fails. And the institution is a party to the application, not a bystander: Heads of Institutes are asked to assist eligible ST students in applying online, and a Nodal Officer at the institution has to verify the file before it moves (Directorate of Tribal Welfare circular).

Get help

Contact

Gagan Bharari questions go to Tribal Welfare, not to the Social Welfare desks that run the SC and OBC (Dhangar) versions. North Goa is the Directorate of Tribal Welfare on the 5th floor of Shram Shakti Bhavan, Patto, Panaji, on 0832-2438024 with fax 0832-2438052 and dir-tw.goa@nic.in. South Goa is the office of the Deputy Director of Tribal Welfare on the 2nd floor of the Old Collectorate Building near the Municipal Garden in Margao, on 0832-2705151 and dydir-tw.margao@gov.in (contact details, Chief Minister Scholarship Portal).

The same page carries the portal's scholarship inquiry number, 8882988000, and a separate National Informatics Centre listing in Goa for technical faults on the portal itself (contact details, Chief Minister Scholarship Portal).

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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