Free Coaching for Students with Disabilities(FCFSWD)

Overview

About FCFSWD

On paper this component carries 1,000 coaching places a year, split 600 for government recruitment exams and 400 for professional entrance exams, per the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities scheme guidelines. What the Department has actually released tells a narrower story: 101 beneficiaries in 2024-25, 250 in 2017-18, nothing at all in the other eight years since 2015-16, and Rs 1.42 crore across the decade against Rs 906.97 crore for the six components of the umbrella scheme together, on its own scheme-wise release table. That gap decides where the form goes: to whichever National Institute or Composite Regional Centre has opened a batch for your exam this year.

This is the sixth component of the Central Sector Umbrella Scheme "Scholarships for Students with Disabilities", listed in the guidelines after the pre-matric, post-matric, Top Class, National Overseas and National Fellowship components. Its object is narrow and worth stating plainly: it buys classroom coaching for a candidate with a benchmark disability who is already committed to a named competitive exam, and pays that candidate a monthly allowance while the classes run.

Who delivers the coaching has changed, and this is the single most useful thing to know before applying. The guidelines route delivery through the National Institutes and Composite Regional Centres under DEPwD's own administrative control, and through central and state government universities and institutes picked by a departmental selection committee. The office memorandum of 4 September 2025 hardened the second route, replacing "may consider implementation" with "will consider implementation".

Older descriptions have not caught up, and the divergence is worth naming before it costs someone an application. The myScheme record still describes financial assistance flowing to registered voluntary organisations, a lower income ceiling, and a stipend that changed according to whether the student was local or out of station. Those are the pre-2024 terms and the current guidelines supersede all three. The lag is not confined to aggregator sites: Composite Regional Centre Tripura opens its own scheme page with the voluntary-organisation description, then lists the conditions that actually apply underneath it.

Two design choices narrow the field further. Online coaching is not supported, and every course on the list carries a minimum of 16 hours a week of physical class, so the candidate has to be able to sit in a room on the implementing institute's campus. That, more than any eligibility test, decides whether the scheme is usable for a given student.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

DEPwD publishes no common opening or closing date for this component, and the myScheme record leaves both fields blank. Each implementing agency runs its own calendar, and the two on the public record for 2025 did not overlap. National Institute for Locomotor Disabilities in Kolkata listed its free coaching notice from 08/01/2025 to 07/04/2025 on its notices page. NIEPVD Dehradun published on 5 June 2025 and shut applications on 28/06/2025 for its SSC and banking batch, a window of barely three weeks. There is no national announcement to wait for, so the calendar has to be assembled from the institutes' own notice pages.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Marks are not what the scheme tests, circumstances are. The candidate must be an Indian national; must have a benchmark disability of 40 percent or more as defined in the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, backed by a valid disability certificate; must hold an Aadhaar number and a Unique Disability ID number; and must already satisfy whatever the exam being prepared for asks of its own candidates. The money condition sits alongside them, at annual family income from all sources of Rs 8 lakh or less, the figure Composite Regional Centre Tripura prints in its eligibility list and the guidelines carry as this component's income ceiling.

The academic bar is borrowed from the exam rather than set by the scheme: Class 12 cleared, or in progress on the day the benefit starts, where the exam's qualifying stage is Class 12; a bachelor's degree finished or in its final year where the exam is pitched at graduates.

An institute can then stack a bar of its own on top of that. NIEPVD Dehradun asked for at least 50 percent marks in Class 10 from applicants to its SSC and railway batch, and 50 percent in Class 12 from applicants to its banking, insurance and PSU batch, in its 2025 coaching notice. Neither figure appears anywhere in the scheme guidelines, so it belongs to that institute and that batch.

One change catches applicants working from an older notice. A UDID enrolment number with the disability certificate used to be accepted in place of the UDID number itself, until the Department's revision dated 24 February 2025 made the number mandatory. The 4 September 2025 memorandum did the same to Aadhaar, dropping the Aadhaar enrolment number from the clause. NIEPVD's June 2025 notice still offers both enrolment numbers as acceptable, which is a reminder that the memoranda bind and the advertisement does not.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

The myScheme record publishes no exclusion list. The guidelines carry four bars. A candidate already availing any other coaching scheme of the Centre or a state government is precluded, and signs a declaration saying so. The benefit is available to a candidate once, whatever the number of attempts or the number of stages the exam allows. Not more than two children with disabilities of the same parents may take it, with the second admitted anyway where the two are twins. And online coaching is excluded outright.

The first three are reproduced on Composite Regional Centre Tripura's scheme page. The online bar is not on that page, and it is not on the institute batch notices either, so it has to be read in the guidelines rather than taken from an advertisement.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

No renewal form exists, and the reason is the once-only rule rather than an annual cycle. A candidate who finishes a course and misses the exam cannot enrol in a second batch under this component, however many attempts the exam itself allows, under the same guidelines.

What is re-earned rather than renewed is the money. Maintenance and disability allowance are payable for a month only where the candidate kept 70 percent attendance that month, per the guidelines, so each month is settled against the biometric record instead of being sanctioned once for a year and continued.

What you get

Award & benefits

Two payments run in opposite directions. The coaching fee is settled with the institute against a ceiling fixed per exam; the stipend and allowances reach the candidate's own Aadhaar-enabled account.

What the candidate personally gets does not vary by course: Rs 4,000 a month as stipend or maintenance allowance, Rs 2,000 a month as disability allowance, and Rs 5,000 once per course for books, all three fixed in para 14.9 of the guidelines and repeated on PDUNIPPD's scheme page. The two monthly amounts stop at the prescribed maximum duration for that course, so an SSC batch that overruns its nine-month ceiling still pays nine months of allowance and no more.

• It provides free coaching to students with disabilities for competitive examinations.
• It helps students with disabilities to improve their academic performance and to compete effectively in competitive examinations.
• It increases the chances of students with disabilities getting admission in higher educational institutions and finding jobs.
• It helps to empower students with disabilities and to improve their quality of life.
• Financial Assistance: monthly stipend : ₹ 2,500/- ( for Local students) and ₹ 5,000/- ( for out station students).

What to prepare

Documents required

The record's list is the starting point, not the pack an institute counter will actually take. Because the implementing agency has to check educational, disability and income credentials against the originals and certify to the Department that each student is genuine, the verification happens across a desk rather than through an upload. PDUNIPPD's notice asks for the Aadhaar card, the UDID card with the disability certificate, an income certificate, the Class 12 certificate, a bank passbook and two passport-size photographs.

Two of those decide more than identity. The passbook matters because nothing is paid except into an Aadhaar-enabled account. The income certificate matters because of who answers if it turns out to be wrong: where an ineligible student is found, the guidelines make the institute solely responsible for having enrolled them, stop the fee and the stipend, and provide for recovering whatever has already gone out from student and institute together, with any penalty the Department fixes.

Step by step

How to apply

Nothing about this component is filed on the National Scholarship Portal, and no countrywide window opens for it. The guidelines name NSP only in the chapter covering the pre-matric, post-matric and Top Class scholarships; free coaching has its own chapter, in which applications are invited by the implementing agencies themselves, offline or online, and candidates are picked by the agency on eligibility and suitability within its allotted slots.

The Department's free coaching page on the PM-DAKSH portal does not close that gap. It opens on a login screen, restates the scheme's objective, and offers registration only for Divyangjan Kaushal Vikas, the Department's skilling programme, and for Divyangjan Rozgar Setu, its employment portal. Neither is an application for coaching.

So the working route is the institute. The Department publishes its National Institutes with addresses and websites and posts scheme circulars on its scholarship page, while the batch notices go up on the institutes' own sites. The seat counts there are small enough to read before committing to a course: NIEPVD Dehradun advertised 20 places for SSC and railway coaching and 20 for banking, insurance and PSU coaching in its batch notice.

Tracking the Application and the Payment

The institute is the only address for a status question, because the shortlisting happens there and the Department sees the names only once the institute forwards its list. PDUNIPPD publishes a landline for exactly that, 011-23233782, staffed at Room No. 16 between 9 AM and 5 PM, on its scheme page.

After selection the trail is a bank statement rather than a dashboard. Maintenance and disability allowance move by direct benefit transfer into the Aadhaar-enabled account on a monthly or quarterly basis, against attendance recorded biometrically at the institute. The 4 September 2025 memorandum rewrote when the book allowance lands: in advance for candidates who make 50 percent attendance in the first 10 days, and with the first instalment of the other allowances for everyone else who has stayed with the course. The same memorandum split the institute's fee into two instalments, the first of 50 percent released on that same first-10-days count and the second after the course ends, counting only candidates who got past its halfway mark. A missing payment therefore usually traces back to an attendance record, and that record sits with the institute.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Selection is local. The implementing agency shortlists against the slots written into its memorandum of understanding, keeping 30 percent of places for female candidates and passing any of those that go unfilled to suitable male candidates, per the guidelines.

What that looks like at a counter is on the record. NIEPVD Dehradun said it would hold an entrance test or interview if applications exceeded its 20 seats, set the paper at 100 marks with a 40 percent pass mark, split the seats half for candidates with visual disabilities and half for locomotor disabilities with either group taking the other's leftovers, and warned that the test would be written without a scribe except in exceptional cases, so Braille proficiency or independent computer use was expected (batch notice).

Where the 1,000 places sit is settled before anyone applies. The 600 earmarked for government recruitment exams are distributed by disability type.

Unfilled places in one disability group may be moved to a group with more applicants, so a thin year in one category is not a wasted allocation. Separately, the Department verifies at least 10 percent of institutes and students, physically or virtually and either itself or through its own institutes, under the monitoring rule as September 2025 rewrote it.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The heaviest obligations fall on the institute, and they shape what a student gets. An implementing agency signs a five-year memorandum of understanding fixing its slots, the courses and the slots per course, the fee per student, the duration and the start and end dates, and the Department reviews its performance every year. Until last year it could not outsource the coaching at all and had to teach on its own campus in every case; the 4 September 2025 memorandum kept both rules, required trainers to be hired directly by the agency, and allowed the Department to grant a specific exemption from either.

For the candidate, the clause with teeth is on false information. A document established as false on verification exposes the candidate to criminal proceedings, to recovery of the amount released with 15 percent compound interest, and to blacklisting from future benefits under government schemes. NIEPVD reprints that clause verbatim in its own notice, so an applicant meets it before applying rather than afterwards.

Get help

Contact

The component is administered from the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities at Antyodaya Bhawan, CGO Complex, Lodhi Road, New Delhi 110003, the address printed on its free coaching circular of 24 February 2025. Circulars and the guidelines in force go up on the DEPwD scholarship page, under the parent Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment. For a specific batch, an admission or a payment, the correct office is the implementing institute rather than the Department, and each institute publishes its own number: 011-23233782 for PDUNIPPD in Delhi on its scheme page, 8394029822 for the Dehradun batch on NIEPVD's notice.

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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