ICAR Junior Research Fellowship For Post-Graduate Studies In Agricultural Sciences(ICARJRFPGS)

Overview

About ICARJRFPGS

There is no separate form for the ICAR Junior Research Fellowship for Post-Graduate Studies. You sit the All India Entrance Examination for Admission (PG), you take a master's seat through ICAR's own counselling, and the money either comes attached to that seat or it does not come at all.

The name has also moved. ICAR's Agricultural Education Division revised its rates in an office order dated 30 October 2018 and recorded the master's-level award there as the ICAR-PG Scholarship, "erstwhile JRF", leaving the JRF and SRF labels on the doctoral stream (ICAR circular). A companion order of the same date reset the sanctioned strengths behind the two labels, and ICAR restated both when it opened the online entrance process in 2020: 600 ICAR-PG Scholarships on the master's side, 300 JRF/SRF on the doctoral side, the master's award paying Rs 12,640 per month (ICAR).

Those seats do not exist everywhere. ICAR quota admissions run only inside its own accredited university system, which the 2026 information bulletin counts at 74 institutions: 63 state agricultural, veterinary, horticultural and fisheries universities, four ICAR deemed-to-be universities, three central agricultural universities and four central universities carrying a faculty of agriculture. The same bulletin puts the share of master's seats filled through this examination at 30 percent, above the 25 percent ICAR described when the online process opened in 2020, and records 4,883 ICAR All India Quota seats across postgraduate programmes in the 2025-26 session (ICAR AIEEA (PG)-2026 Information Bulletin; ICAR).

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

Everything below belongs to the entrance; the fellowship itself is decided at the end of it, once online counselling has closed.

Nothing carries forward. Candidates declared eligible for counselling may seek admission only in the session the examination was held for, and cannot claim a seat in a later year on the strength of this year's result. Any legal question arising from the examination has to be raised within 30 days of the result, and jurisdiction sits in Delhi (bulletin).

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The threshold is a long bachelor's degree with a hard grade floor. The bulletin admits candidates who have passed a four-year or six-year programme (12+4 or 10+6 B.Sc. Ag. or B.Tech.) or a five or five-and-a-half year B.V.Sc. & A.H., and requires an Overall Grade Point Average of at least 6.60/10.00 for General, OBC, UPS and EWS candidates and 5.60/10.00 for SC, ST, PwBD and third gender candidates (bulletin).

Where a university awards marks rather than grade points, the same bulletin sets 60% and 50% respectively, refuses any equivalence between the two systems, and rules out rounding, so 49.99% stays below the line; the minimum age is 19 years as on 31 August 2026, with no relaxation admissible (bulletin).

Two conditions catch people late. Every degree requirement has to be complete by 31 July 2026, or by 15 January 2027 for the veterinary stream, and a candidate without the degree certificate has to produce a Registrar's letter saying so with the final OGPA on it (bulletin). Candidates already enrolled in a master's programme may still compete for fresh admission and for the scholarship, provided they have not completed one year of that programme on the date of the examination.

In-service candidates are a separate track. They qualify only on the overall merit list of their subject, produce a sponsorship certificate from their employer at counselling, and must be working in an ICAR institute, a deemed or state or central agricultural university, a central university with an agriculture faculty, or a government department or public sector undertaking dealing with agriculture and allied sectors.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

The bar here is drawn by route rather than by background. The 2016 guidelines state plainly that the fellowship is not available for admission in any university outside the list of agricultural universities they name (ICAR guidelines), and a seat won through a university's own entrance test is therefore outside it however good the marks were.

Repeat awards are shut off too, and so is a second stipend from anywhere else:

• A candidate who held the ICAR-PG Scholarship in an earlier year is not awarded it again even if the merit rank would support it, though admission is still granted on that rank.
• A current holder who takes fresh admission has to refund the entire amount received to the university, with interest.
• A scholarship vacated for any reason is not passed down the merit list, in that subject group or in any other.
• Stacking awards is out. Anything else the student is already drawing has to be given up before the Council's is accepted, and nothing new may be taken up while it runs (ICAR guidelines).

Reservation cuts differently for the scholarship than for the seat. The bulletin reserves 15% of scholarships for Scheduled Caste and 7.5% for Scheduled Tribe candidates, interchangeable between the two when one runs short, and 5% horizontally for PwBD candidates, while stating that no ICAR-PG Scholarship is reserved for Gen-EWS, OBC (NCL) and UPS candidates, who remain entitled to win one on merit (bulletin).

Continuation

Renewal conditions

A two-year award has exactly one renewal in it, and the student is not the person who applies for it. The first year's money reaches the university in advance once the award is sanctioned; the second year turns on the head of that university raising a demand for funds, and on the fellow's guide certifying, with the head's approval, that the work is on schedule and that the OGPA the fellowship requires has been held. Drop below that OGPA and there is nothing to appeal, because the Council will not entertain the renewal at all (ICAR guidelines).

There is a ceiling on how long this can repeat. The award runs two years from the date of registration in the master's programme and is not extended beyond that, whatever the university's own course tenure turns out to be. Graduates of a 10+2+3 stream admitted to IARI or NDRI carry a further wrinkle: no fellowship is payable during their first year, which goes on remedial courses (bulletin).

What you get

Award & benefits

Two payments run together, plus a fallback for candidates who miss the scholarship but keep the seat.

The contingency grant is tied down more tightly than students expect. It is meant for essential chemicals, equipment, books and research travel, not more than half of it may go on books, and every purchase needs the approval of the Major Advisor or the Chairman of the Student Advisory Committee (bulletin).

The scheme record below still carries ICAR's older two-track rate, one figure for veterinary sciences and a lower one for every other discipline. The guidelines themselves fix no amount, saying only that rates are as prescribed by the Council from time to time; the Council's order of 30 October 2018 prescribed a single ICAR-PG Scholarship rate, and that is the figure the 2026 bulletin still quotes.

• Veterinary Sciences: ₹ 12,000/- per month With a contingency grant of ₹ 6,000/- per annum. - All disciplines other than Veterinary Sciences: ₹ 8,640/- per month With a contingency grant of ₹ 6,000/- per annum.
• _The rates of fellowship and contingency grants for higher studies will be as prescribed by the Council from time to time._

What to prepare

Documents required

Almost nothing is verified when you apply. Apart from a category or PwBD certificate where one is claimed, no certificate is uploaded with the online form; the documents are checked directly at the admitting university, and a candidate found ineligible at that stage loses the admission (bulletin).

What the university actually asks for is the degree or a Registrar's certificate covering the final OGPA and, for veterinary candidates, the completed internship and viva; the SC/ST, OBC (NCL) and EWS certificates in the formats annexed to the bulletin; a UDID or disability certificate verified against the DePwD portal; a domicile certificate for candidates claiming the remote and underprivileged states quota; and a sponsorship certificate for in-service candidates. At registration the awardee also executes a surety bond of an amount fixed by the university.

Step by step

How to apply

The application is online and singular. Candidates register at the NTA portal for the examination, note the system-generated application number, complete the form with a live photograph alongside the scanned photograph and signature, and pay the fee, which in the 2026 cycle stood at Rs 1,300 for General, Rs 1,255 for OBC (NCL), UPS and EWS, and Rs 675 for SC, ST, PwBD and third gender candidates, with the bank or gateway charge extra. Only one application per candidate is accepted, and the confirmation page is the proof the payment went through; where no confirmation page appears the transaction has failed and has to be made again, with duplicates reconciled after the final result (bulletin).

Tracking after that runs off the same login rather than any letter. The advance intimation of the examination city, the admit card, the recorded responses, the provisional answer key, the final key and the score card all appear on the NTA site for this examination, and the counselling schedule appears on ICAR's site after the result (NTA). A challenge to the provisional key costs Rs 200 per question and is not refunded, no separate intimation of non-selection or of marks is sent to anyone, and NTA weeds out the examination record 90 days after the result is declared, so a candidate who wants a copy has to save it while it is up (bulletin).

Tracking the money is a different desk. ICAR releases funds to the head of the university rather than to the student, and the second year's instalment depends on that head raising a demand with the guide's progress certificate (ICAR guidelines), which is why a late payment is chased with the university's comptroller or nodal officer and not with the Council.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Merit is computed inside a major subject group, not across the whole examination. The paper is a computer-based test of 120 multiple choice questions in 120 minutes, in English only, marked 4 for a correct answer and -1 for a wrong one, and held at 122 cities. Master's degrees are awarded in 81 sub-subjects grouped into 20 major subject groups; the candidate chooses the major subject group when applying and the sub-subject only during online counselling (bulletin).

How many scholarships a subject group carries is not fixed to its seats. From the 2017-18 session ICAR moved the distribution criterion to the average number of candidates who actually appeared in that major subject over the preceding three years, so the number rises and falls with demand and is known only at counselling (bulletin).

Counselling is the step that converts a rank into both things at once. Only candidates ICAR declares eligible for registration and choice filling are considered for allocation of a subject and a university, and the bulletin is blunt that there is no provision of direct nomination for admission through ICAR in any master's programme without qualifying in the examination. The scholarship is awarded only after online counselling is complete.

Where the seat lands is partly out of the candidate's hands, and the fellowship travels with the seat. A single state's candidates cannot take more than 40% of the admissions in one university within a subject and category, so a rank good enough for the money can still place a student outside the home state (bulletin). Candidates domiciled in the remote and underprivileged states and union territories the bulletin lists sit in their own 2% horizontal slice of each discipline, produce a domicile certificate at admission, and compete inside that slice without a further state quota.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

Accepting the award means signing a bond. Every awardee executes a surety bond at registration in an amount the university sets, and the university is the party made responsible for clawing back whatever was drawn if the student leaves before finishing the programme (bulletin). Walking out is priced twice over. Quit inside the first six months of joining and the Council pays nothing whatever for that stretch; quit later without its permission and payment stops on the day of leaving (ICAR guidelines).

Day-to-day conditions sit with the university. The fellow is under the administrative control of its head and works under a recognised guide on its faculty, and no fellowship is paid during a strike, during conduct probation, or on a day the fellow does not attend class or the departmental seminar. Admission has to be taken within one year of the award letter or the fellowship lapses automatically, and the guidelines list termination without notice for a fellow dropped for poor performance, found negligent, or off the university rolls.

Two obligations outlast the money. A soft copy of the master's thesis is due to the Council inside three months of finishing, carrying an acknowledgement of the Council's financial support that also has to appear on research papers. And the work itself is not the student's to license: the intellectual property in research output produced under the fellowship stays with ICAR, and how a student is named on a paper is the guide's decision alone, with no right in that regard claimable (ICAR guidelines). After admission, ICAR does not entertain a request to change either the subject or the university.

Get help

Contact

Two bodies own different halves of this, and writing to the wrong one loses time. NTA holds the application, the examination and the score card, on +011-4075-9000 and +011-6922-7700 and at its examination site for ICAR; icar@nta.ac.in is the address for a fee that left the bank without producing a confirmation page, and legal@nta.ac.in the only channel for a legal notice (bulletin). Everything after the result is ICAR's: the counselling schedule, the seat, the award letter, and the fellowship rules the Council's Agricultural Education Division issues over its own signature (ICAR guidelines). Once the award letter is issued, a question about an unpaid instalment belongs with the comptroller or nodal officer of the agricultural university holding the funds, not with either of them.

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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