Financial Support Scheme(FSSDU)

The 2025-26 cycle ran from a September notification to a February result, and the University announces each stage as a separate notice.

The dates move between sessions, and the DSW office's own standard operating procedure describes a different rhythm, with forms opening in December and closing on 12 January. Treat the current session's dated notice as binding and the procedure document as background.

You need to be a full-time bonafide student on a regular UG or PG degree programme at a Department, Institution or Centre of the University, with annual family income at or below Rs 8,00,000. The University's own notification for 2025-26 sets the programme condition and the two income bands, and adds no merit test on top: no cutoff percentage, no entrance rank, no reservation quota inside the scheme.

The rest of the exclusions run by programme, not by income. B.Tech students other than those at the Cluster Innovation Centre, and students on the five-year integrated law programmes, are kept out because a fee waiver was already granted to them at admission, so the University does not let them claim a second one, per the scheme record on myScheme. That record also places the School of Open Learning and the Non-Collegiate Women's Education Board outside this round, and a certificate, diploma or advanced diploma course is not a degree programme, so it does not qualify either.

Arrears end an application outright. A student carrying an Essential Repeat paper from any previous examination is not eligible to apply, and the mark sheet of the last examination passed sits in the required document list, so the check is made on paper rather than left to a declaration.

The other exclusions are paperwork exclusions and they are strict. An income certificate attested by a notary is rejected, and a certificate is only accepted when a competent authority issued it after March 31 of the year the round opens, which for the 2025-26 cycle meant after March 31, 2025. An old income certificate lying in your file from admission year will not be counted.

Neither the DSW notification nor the myScheme record carries a renewal clause, and neither treats an earlier waiver as something that rolls forward. The office reopens FSS as a fresh announcement every session, with a new online form, a new document date and a new cut-off on the income certificate, so a student waived in one session builds the whole file again in the next.

The waiver is banded by family income, and each band carries a rupee ceiling that matters more than the percentage does.

Read the ceiling before the percentage if you are on an expensive programme. A hundred percent waiver stops at Rs 15,000, so on a fee well above that figure the scheme meets a slice of the bill and no more, while on a small departmental fee the same band clears it outright. Category 2 is capped lower at Rs 10,000, and half of a large fee reaches that ceiling quickly. The 2025-26 provisional list makes this visible, because it prints the fee, the waiver percentage and the rupee grant against every shortlisted name, and the grants sanctioned against the larger departmental fees stop at Rs 15,000 and Rs 10,000.

The file turns on three things the University verifies rather than accepts: the income proof, the returns, and the attestations from your department.

Income proof has two accepted forms, an EWS or OBC-NCL certificate or an annual family income certificate from a competent authority, and both must be dated after March 31 of the round's year. Income tax returns are asked for the father, mother, unmarried sisters and unmarried brothers below 25 years of age, with PAN copies for each of those family members. Where the family files no return at all, a signed Undertaking Form takes the place of the ITR in that section of the application, and the income certificate then carries the whole weight of the means test.

Watch the assessment year on the returns. The 2025-26 document notice asked for Income Tax Returns of 2024-25 while the scheme page on the DSW site still carried an older year in the same list. The dated notice for the current round is the one to follow.

The rest is attestation. Your bonafide certificate and the application form itself have to be signed and recommended by the Head or Director of your Department, Centre or Institute before the University will accept them, which makes your department office the real first stop rather than the DSW counter.

FSS never touches the National Scholarship Portal, and nothing at the end of it arrives as a direct benefit transfer. DSW opens its own online form for the session, and the rest of the process is paper: you upload the documents with the form, print the submitted form, have it and the bonafide certificate signed by your Head or Director, and hand the physical set in at the venue named in the schedule notice.

The offline stage is scheduled by serial number rather than open all day. For the 2025-26 round the University called students to the Multipurpose Hall at Gate no 2 on October 9 and 10, 2025, in reporting slots at 9:00 AM, 11:00 AM and 3:00 PM, and it kept an extra 2:00 PM slot on the second day for students who could not complete the online form or whose names were missing from the list, provided they met the eligibility criteria and carried verified documents. That reporting schedule ran serial numbers up to 3204 across the two days.

Tracking is the part students most often look for, and DSW publishes no status login for it. The office puts out a provisional list as a PDF on the DSW site and in the news section of du.ac.in, and that list is the status: against each shortlisted name it prints a file number, the department, the programme, the fee, the waiver percentage and the rupee grant, so you can see the exact amount sanctioned rather than only whether you were selected. If your name is missing or a figure is wrong, the notices route the correction one way only, as a hard copy representation with supporting documents at the Dean Students' Welfare office, Conference Centre, opposite the Botany Department, Gate no 4, between 2:00 PM and 4:30 PM inside the grievance window.

Selection is a verification exercise run by a screening committee, not a ranking. The DSW office's published procedure has the committee scrutinise every application form, physically verify the residences of some shortlisted applicants and conduct interviews before a final list goes to the FSS committee and then to the competent authorities for approval.

That house visit is why the address on your form should be the one you can be found at. It also explains the gap between applications and awards in the 2022-23 round: the fall from 2,095 applicants to 1,009 waivers came out of document verification and the eligibility test, not out of a fixed number of awards, so a complete and internally consistent file is most of the work.

The shortlist is provisional and stays subject to verification of records until the competent authorities approve the final list. Grievances are only heard in the published window, and the window is short. The notice carrying the 2025-26 list opened it on February 4, 2026 and first closed it on February 16, and the extension notice then pushed the last date to February 23, 2026 and states that no grievances will be considered thereafter.

Because the benefit is a waiver or refund of fee already paid, the money settles against your fee account and reaches a bank account only where a refund is due, which is why the bank passbook copy or cancelled cheque is a required document rather than an optional one.

FSS is run out of the Dean Students' Welfare office, University of Delhi, Delhi-110007, and every notice for the scheme goes out over that office's signature with dsw@du.ac.in printed under it. Representations against the provisional list are received in person at the Conference Centre, opposite the Botany Department, Gate no 4.

Students of the School of Open Learning, DDCE and the Campus of Open Learning are handled elsewhere. Their fee waiver runs through the Campus of Open Learning's own FSS page and application link, where SOL also lists helpline numbers 011-65213030 and 011-27008300 and a toll free line on 1800118301, Monday to Friday.