Haryana State Meritorious Incentive Scheme(HSMIS)

Overview

About HSMIS

The Haryana State Meritorious Incentive Scheme rewards a finishing position, not a financial situation. The Department of Higher Education pays a fixed annual amount to the students who stand first, second and third in each stream in the annual university examination, and it pays them only if they are studying in a government college of the state, according to the scheme guidelines published on Har-Chhatravratti.

The streams it counts are Arts, Commerce, Science (Medical and Non-Medical) and Education, and it counts them at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, so a topper in an MA or MSc class is inside the scheme on the same terms as a topper in a BA class. The award is worked out separately for each of those streams rather than pooled into one college merit list.

What sets this award apart from almost everything else on the state scholarship portal is clause (vi) of its guidelines, a single line: there is no income limit for these awards. A first position therefore holds its value whatever the household earns, which is not true of the two post-matric rows that open the portal's scheme comparison grid and stop at Rs 2,50,000 a year.

The name is the hardest part of finding it. A Haryana government college's published scholarship note lists this award as the Haryana State (Meritorious Incentive Scheme) Scholarship Scheme and gives the title Haryana State Meritorious Incentive Scheme to the separate CBSE board-topper award, reversing the labels the state portal uses. If a college notice board and the portal seem to describe two different things under one name, they are.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

No annual calendar is published for this scheme. The myScheme record carries neither an opening nor a closing date, and the binding date is the one printed against the scheme's row in the table on the Har-Chhatravratti home page, which the department updates each session. For the session captured there, that row read closed on 11 February 2026, the same date shown against every other Directorate of Higher Education scheme in the table.

Two things follow from that pattern. The window is announced and extended through portal notices rather than through a fixed yearly date, so the notice board on the portal home page is the thing to watch. And because the department closes its higher education schemes together, a student eligible for more than one of them has a single date to plan around rather than several.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Three facts decide this award and none of them is money: the college is a government college, the course is a general course, and the result puts the student in the top three of the stream.

Category and domicile are not fields anyone types in. Har-Chhatravratti fetches domicile, family income, caste category and Aadhaar from the Parivar Pehchan Patra and makes them non-editable at registration, so a student whose family record carries the wrong category has to fix the Parivar Pehchan Patra first and register afterwards, as the portal's standard operating procedure sets out.

The merit test runs inside one college rather than across the state. Because the guidelines make the scheme college-specific and prepare separate lists for boys in the general category, girls in the general category, and Scheduled Caste students of both sexes together, one government college can produce several award holders in a single stream, and a percentage that wins in one college can finish outside the top three in another. A Scheduled Caste student who earns a place on the general list stays on it, and the extra award then goes down the Scheduled Caste list on merit.

The eligibility grid adds one comparison worth noticing. Where the post-matric rows on that same comparison grid demand attendance of 75 per cent or more, the row for this incentive records attendance as N/A and the institute type as Govt Only.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

The scheme record on myScheme carries no exclusion list at all, but the guidelines carry three real ones: students of non-government colleges, students studying through correspondence courses or open universities, and, as the department reads its own clause (v), anyone already drawing another scholarship or stipend from the State Government or any other source.

The first of those is stricter than it looks next to the state's other awards. On the department's eligibility grid, the CBSE incentive and the merit scholarship for undergraduate and postgraduate students both accept Govt, Aided and SFC institutes; this one accepts Govt only, which puts government-aided and self-financing college students outside it however well they have done.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

There is nothing to renew. The incentive attaches to the academic year in which the position was won, and a student who wants it again has to finish in the top three again the following year. The Haryana Vidhan Sabha subject committee on education, describing the state's college scholarship schemes in its seventh report for 2021-22, records the CBSE topper incentive as a renewal scheme and notes no such feature for this one.

What you get

Award & benefits

The rate depends only on where the student finished in the stream.

Those three slabs repeat for every stream the guidelines name, so a single government college can pay out well beyond three awards in a year across its Arts, Commerce, Science and Education results and across the three separate merit lists. No statewide cap on the number of awards appears in the guidelines.

Payment runs through Direct Benefit Transfer, which the guidelines date to 2021-22 and make subject to approval from the higher authority. The mechanics of that transfer are where money is most often lost: disbursement is made only to Aadhaar-seeded bank accounts, and the department has posted notices about scholarship amounts being returned because of discrepancies in bank accounts or Aadhaar details, so an account that is dormant or unseeded quietly defeats an award that was properly sanctioned.

• ₹5,000/- per annum for students securing the first position in their stream.
• ₹3,000/- per annum for students securing the second position in their stream.
• ₹2,000/- per annum for students securing the third position in their stream.
• Mode of Disbursement
• Payment is made through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT).
• The incentive is applicable only for the academic year in which the student secures a top position.

What to prepare

Documents required

The list attached to this scheme is not really this scheme's list. It is the same Key Documents Required block the portal shows every applicant on its how to apply page, which is why an income certificate and a BPL certificate sit under an award the guidelines say has no income limit. Bring them if a college asks, but the documents that decide this particular application are the ones proving the result and the institution: the last examination passed certificate, the fee receipt, and the Parivar Pehchan Patra the registration is keyed to.

Scans matter more than the list length. The standard operating procedure asks students to check that uploaded documents are clear and readable and that the mobile number in the application belongs to the applicant, because objections are sent by SMS and an application marked defective has to be corrected by the student. The extra attested set the portal defines for Haryana-domicile students studying outside the state does not come into play here, since the guidelines confine this award to government colleges within Haryana.

Step by step

How to apply

Registration comes before the scheme. A first-time applicant registers on Har-Chhatravratti with the family identity number from the Parivar Pehchan Patra, picks their own name from the family member list, verifies the OTP sent to that member's mobile, checks the auto-filled details, selects the department and college and sets a password. Registration happens once: a student who applied for any scheme on the portal in an earlier academic year logs in with the same credentials instead of registering again.

The application itself is short, because the portal already holds the personal data. After logging in, the student picks this scheme from the list they are eligible for, enters course, roll number and eligibility details, and submits, which forwards the application to the college rather than to the department. Picking the wrong college is the mistake worth avoiding: correcting it means getting the institute that was chosen to mark the form Send Back for Correction before the name can be changed. A form filed under the wrong scheme is undone by a different route, a request raised from the student login that lets the college delete that session's application so the correct scheme can be picked, which is the instruction the department prints on the portal home page.

Checking Where the Application and the Money Have Reached

The portal's Track Application form is open without a login. It asks for the scheme name, the Aadhaar number and the academic session, with sessions listed from 2020-21 through 2025-26, and returns the current status of that application. Students who are logged in see the same status on their dashboard.

Status is worth reading literally, because the application passes three verifications before any money is generated. The standard operating procedure describes the chain as verification at institute level, then at nodal body level, then at head office level, followed by payment file generation, financial approval and disbursement through DBT. An application sent back for correction returns to the student and re-enters the pending queue once resubmitted; one marked Rejected by a nodal officer is not carried forward at all. Where a status stops moving, the portal's grievance module issues a grievance number that can be checked on its own tracking page.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Selection is arithmetic, not assessment. The guidelines make the incentive strictly merit-based, and where two students in a stream have equal marks or an equal percentage, the award goes on the marks obtained in the main subjects. There is no interview, no essay and no separate merit committee described anywhere in the scheme document.

One limit sits alongside that rule and it is easy to misread. The marks being ranked come from a university examination, but the ranking is done inside a single college's cohort, so the winner is the topper of an institution and not of a university, and no state-level or university-wide merit list is drawn up anywhere in the scheme document.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The condition students most need clarity on is the one the guidelines fumble. Clause (v) is printed without its negative, so it reads as though an award holder may also hold another scholarship or stipend from the State Government or any other source, which is the opposite of what the department answers on the scheme record. Read the record's own answer as the operative one and treat this award as exclusive of other state assistance.

The rest are enforced by the payment system rather than by a signature. The bank account has to be Aadhaar-seeded, active and free of credit limits that would block the transfer; the Parivar Pehchan Patra has to be current, since every locked field in the application is drawn from it; and the government has reserved the power to alter the regulation whenever it chooses.

Get help

Contact

The scheme owner is the Directorate of Higher Education, Haryana, at Shiksha Sadan, Sector 5, Panchkula 134105. Its scholarship helpdesk is reachable on 0172-2565530 and at helpdeskscholarship@highereduhry.ac.in, both listed on the portal's contact page. For anything specific to one application, the college's scholarship nodal officer is the faster route, since that is the desk holding the first level of verification.

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.

Explore more

Related scholarships

References

Sources