Innovation In Science Pursuit For Inspired Research (INSPIRE) - Scholarship For Higher Education (SHE)(INSPIRE-SHE)

Overview

About INSPIRE-SHE

The last batch the Department of Science and Technology called applications for was SHE-2024, and its portal window ran from 1 September to 15 October 2024 (Call for Applications under SHE, 2024). No SHE call has appeared on the portal in the two admission seasons since. If you are a science undergraduate looking for the INSPIRE Scholarship for Higher Education today, that gap is the first thing worth knowing, and the second is that the scheme has not been closed.

Asked in the Rajya Sabha on 13 August 2026 whether the government had shelved its flagship INSPIRE-SHE scholarship and why it had not been notified for two years, the Ministry of Science and Technology replied that it had not been shelved and is "presently under redesign to further strengthen its objectives, improve its implementation framework, and align it with emerging priorities in science education and research" (Rajya Sabha Unstarred Question 2996). That answer named no revised eligibility, no new benefit and no date for a fresh call.

The redesign is not a wind-down of what has already been awarded. Answering the same question, the Ministry gave the running total since the scheme began as 136,298 students benefited and Rs 2,784.15 crore disbursed, with Uttar Pradesh alone accounting for 60,263 of those students and Rs 916.64 crore (Rajya Sabha Unstarred Question 2996). A year before that, in August 2025, it told the House that 49,582 INSPIRE scholars were being supported at that point (PIB, 21 August 2025).

The scheme the redesign starts from is the one the Ministry set out in that August 2025 reply: 12,000 scholarships, each of five years' duration, at the rate of Rs 80,000 per year, awarded to the top 1% of talented youth identified from central and state education board data in the age group of 17 to 22 years, for bachelor's and master's study in basic and natural sciences (PIB, 21 August 2025). SHE is the undergraduate money. A doctorate is the INSPIRE Fellowship's business and post-doctoral work the Faculty Fellowship's (PIB, 21 August 2025), while INSPIRE-MANAK is a school innovation award DST runs with the National Innovation Foundation for classes 6 to 12 (INSPIRE Awards MANAK). None of those is the scholarship described here.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

There is no live application window, and no date has been announced for the redesigned scheme. The most recent completed cycle is SHE-2024, which opened on 1 September 2024 and closed at 23:59 IST on 15 October 2024. Its outcome is still posted on the INSPIRE portal home page, as the Board Inclusive Model evaluation chart for the 2024 batch and, after it, the provisionally selected and rejected lists from the abeyance cases (INSPIRE web portal).

Because eligibility is tied to the same year's Class XII result and the same year's college admission, the call has historically followed the admission season rather than preceding it. A student finishing Class XII should therefore watch the portal from the start of the academic year rather than wait for a school circular, and existing scholars should note that document deadlines run on their own clock regardless of whether a new batch is called.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The FAQ document DST publishes for SHE, the version issued alongside the 2024 call, sets out five alternative routes, and clearing any one of them is enough. The advertisement for that call was narrower. It printed the board-merit route, the entrance-rank route and the NTSE, JBNSTS and Olympiad route, and left out the named-institution and KVPY clauses that the FAQ still carries (Call for Applications under SHE, 2024). Read together, the FAQ tells you what the scheme permits and the advertisement tells you what a given year's form actually accepts.

Age is a hard filter on top of all five, since the scheme takes applicants in the 17 to 22 year age group only (SHE FAQs, DST INSPIRE). So is timing. Only candidates who completed Class XII in the year of the call and enrolled in a qualifying degree in that same year may apply, and the SHE-2024 advertisement puts it in capital letters that students who passed Class XII in previous years will not be considered. A gap year between school and college ends the claim before it starts.

The subject list is where an otherwise eligible student is most often turned away, and it is not the same list at both levels. Eighteen subjects are in scope at bachelor's level: physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, statistics, geology, astrophysics, astronomy, electronics, botany, zoology, biochemistry, anthropology, microbiology, geophysics, geochemistry, atmospheric sciences and oceanic sciences. The master's list runs to 30, adding ecology, marine biology, genetics, biophysics, biostatistics, data science, environmental science, materials science, nano science, remote sensing and GIS, and, notably, bioinformatics and biotechnology, both of which are barred at undergraduate level (SHE FAQs, DST INSPIRE). Check which copy of the FAQ you are reading before you rely on that: DST still hosts an earlier version whose master's list stops at biophysics, so the eight newest subjects do not appear on it at all (earlier SHE FAQ, DST INSPIRE), and the portal carries the change as a separate notice on the inclusion of additional subjects at M.Sc. level (INSPIRE web portal). At that stage the FAQ is explicit that M.Tech. courses are not supported.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

The bar sits in the course list rather than in a roster of barred applicants, which is why a strong candidate can be turned away on their degree title alone. Engineering, medicine, military science, defence studies, agriculture, psychology, seed technology, home science, geography, economics, education including the B.Sc.-B.Ed. dual degree, biotechnology, computer science, computer applications, bioinformatics, instrumentation, information technology, physical education, and courses taken in distance education mode at open universities are all outside the scheme, along with other professional courses (SHE FAQs, DST INSPIRE).

The other two bars bite after an offer is issued rather than at the application stage. Holding a scholarship from any other source at the same time is not permitted, and a scholar found doing so has the provisional offer withdrawn and becomes liable to return everything DST has paid. Discontinuing the qualifying course withdraws the offer permanently, and rejoining the same course the following year does not restore it.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Continuation is annual, and it is decided on documents you upload rather than on your enrolment continuing. The academic bar is a pass in all subjects at first attempt with a minimum of 60% marks, or a minimum of 7.0 CGPA on a 10-point scale where the result is issued in CGPA. DST does not convert one into the other in either direction (Post-Offer Implementation Guidelines for SHE).

What you file each year is a Performance Report in the prescribed format plus the annual or both semester mark sheets, uploaded together and not in parts. The Performance Report has to be signed by the Vice-Chancellor, Registrar or Dean of Science at a university, or the Principal, Vice-Principal, Proctor or Officer-in-Charge at a college. Attestation by a Head of Department or a student welfare officer is rejected, and so is a provisional mark sheet or one downloaded from the internet unless the Controller of Examination or Registrar has attested it.

Timing decides as much as the result does. Documents should go up within two months of the result, the outer limit is twelve months for an academic year ending in June, and after that the year cannot be claimed. Missing two consecutive years withdraws the offer altogether. A failure in any subject, or a result below the threshold, forfeits that year's scholarship but not the offer, and payment resumes the next year if the marks recover. Missing the university examination entirely costs one year on the same terms. A change of subject, college or university is permitted only during the first year of B.Sc. and only within the 18 identified subjects, with one exception: moving to another college affiliated to the same university is allowed anywhere in the B.Sc. tenure so long as the subject stays on that list. Any other change stops the scholarship with no route to restoration, and a break of a year or more between B.Sc. and M.Sc. ends it as well (Post-Offer Implementation Guidelines for SHE).

What you get

Award & benefits

The headline Rs 80,000 is two separate payments with different conditions attached, which is why a scholar can receive one and lose the other in the same year.

Payment does not start in the first year. The first two years are released together, as Rs 1,20,000, during the second year of the course, once the first-year mark sheet and Performance Report have been approved (SHE FAQs, DST INSPIRE). Later years follow the same approve-then-release order.

The mentorship grant buys a real obligation. Every scholar is expected to do a research project each year during the summer vacation, under a supervisor, at a recognised institute or laboratory outside their own institution, for a minimum of six to eight weeks. Group projects are not accepted, only one project per academic year is funded, and an unused grant does not carry into the next year for work done in India. Work abroad is treated differently: a scholar in the fourth or fifth year may use the unclaimed balance of the grant, capped at Rs 1,00,000 across the five years, and only the difference between what the host pays and what the trip costs is released (Post-Offer Implementation Guidelines for SHE). DST told Parliament in August 2026 that 271 scholars have completed a summer research mentorship project abroad so far (Rajya Sabha Unstarred Question 2996).

• The scholarship is valued at ₹ 80,000/- per annum.
• Each candidate will receive an annual scholarship @ ₹ 5000/- per month with a total value of ₹ 60,000/-.
• All the SHE scholars are required to undertake summer research projects under an active researcher in any recognized research centre across India.
• A summertime Mentorship grant of ₹ 20,000/- will be paid every year.
• The scholarship will be transferred to the scholar’s State Bank of India (SBI) bank account directly through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) mode.

What to prepare

Documents required

The scheme's document list is short, but its file specifications and its two-stage timing are where applications fail. At application, the passport photograph goes up as a JPEG of at most 50 KB and every other file as a PDF of at most 1 MB, covering the Class X certificate for date of birth, the Class XII mark sheet, and the endorsement form signed by the Principal, Director or Registrar (Call for Applications under SHE, 2024). The eligibility or advisory note from your board is optional. The rank or award certificate for JEE Main, JEE Advanced, NEET, KVPY, JBNSTS, NTSE or an International Olympiad is mandatory if that is the route you are claiming (SHE FAQs, DST INSPIRE), and an incomplete application is rejected without correspondence.

The second stage arrives only if you are selected. A self-attested front page of the SBI passbook and your Aadhaar or Aadhaar enrolment slip must be uploaded within six months of the provisional offer letter, with the passbook page signed. Miss that and the portal closes on you automatically, the offer stands cancelled, and your name appears on the site under cancelled scholarships with no separate intimation (Post-Offer Implementation Guidelines for SHE). Nothing in either stage travels by post (Guidelines for submitting account details, performance reports and mark sheets).

Step by step

How to apply

A SHE application exists only as a portal record. You register at online-inspire.gov.in against a live call, submit once, and keep a printout for your own file; the advertisement bars a second application from the same candidate and rules out anything sent by post (Call for Applications under SHE, 2024).

Tracking has two halves, and students confuse them. The application half lives entirely inside your portal account: status is shown only there, the lists of selected and rejected candidates are published on the portal home page, and the provisional offer letter or the rejection letter appears as a dashboard notification rather than arriving by email or post. The INSPIRE/SHE registration number DST asks you to quote in correspondence is printed on that offer letter, and it is not the registration number your college or university issued you (SHE FAQs, DST INSPIRE).

The payment half runs on the bank account. It has to be a savings account with no transaction limit, at any branch of the State Bank of India, exclusively in the scholar's name and linked to Aadhaar. The portal posts a notification when the account it has on file is a joint, no-frills or zero-balance, Jan Dhan, minor, limited, inactive or dormant one, and a scholar has one month from that notification to put it right (Post-Offer Implementation Guidelines for SHE). Money then moves by Direct Benefit Transfer. Release normally takes three to four months after the documents are approved or the instalment is notified on the portal, and if nothing has arrived five months after approval, DST asks scholars to write to inspire.prog-dst@nic.in (SHE FAQs, DST INSPIRE).

None of this is currently actionable for a new applicant. There is no open window, and the portal page where boards upload their Class X and Class XII top 1% data, the input the whole selection runs on, carries a notice that it is presently unavailable for uploading and asks users to wait for further instruction (Education Boards Data, INSPIRE portal).

How winners are picked

Selection process

SHE sets no examination of its own. A striking feature of INSPIRE, in DST's own words, is that it does not conduct any competitive examination for identification of talent at any level and relies on the efficacy of the existing educational structure instead (DST, INSPIRE Scheme). Selection is therefore an arithmetic exercise on board results and entrance ranks.

For the board route it uses the Board Inclusive Model. Each board's share of the scholarships is its own valid applications divided by the total valid applications across all boards, multiplied by the number of scholarships available that year. Two things follow. The qualifying mark is repositioned every cycle rather than fixed, and a board whose students apply in large numbers is allotted a proportionally larger part of that year's pool. The state figures DST gives Parliament are correspondingly lopsided: in 2024-25, up to 27 March 2025, Uttar Pradesh accounted for 5,374 INSPIRE-SHE selections and Rajasthan for 2,879, while Tamil Nadu recorded 44 and Telangana 31 (PIB, 2 April 2025).

The nearest thing to a published cut-off is the indicative board table DST attached to the SHE-2024 call, showing where the top 1% fell in the 2023 Class XII results. DST labels it indicative and finalises each year's figure under the Board Inclusive Model after applications close, so treat it as a reference point rather than a target.

Evaluation is slow by design. DST warns that the volume of applications makes selection take at least four months from the last date of submission. Every offer is provisional when it is issued, and it is confirmed only after the scholar's first-year mark sheet shows they are actually in a qualifying subject.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

Three clauses sit in the fine print and matter more than their placement suggests. An incomplete or wrongly filled application is rejected summarily and DST entertains no claim or representation about it. Concurrent scholarships are not allowed, and a scholar who wants INSPIRE-SHE after holding another award has to produce documentary evidence such as a scholarship surrender certificate. Litigation, if it comes to that, has one venue: the advertisement places any claim or dispute arising out of it, or out of an application made under it, before Delhi courts, tribunals and forums alone (Call for Applications under SHE, 2024).

DST also states in the post-offer guidelines that it reserves the right to review and modify them as and when required, which is the standing clause the current redesign sits under.

Get help

Contact

The INSPIRE Programme Division of the Department of Science and Technology handles SHE queries at inspire.prog-dst@nic.in, with telephone lines on 0124-6690020 and 0124-6690021 (Call for Applications under SHE, 2024). Anyone going in person to DST in New Delhi should note that queries on the INSPIRE programme are taken on Mondays only (INSPIRE web portal). Portal-specific problems, including bank account defects and offer letters, are handled through your own account on online-inspire.gov.in rather than by email.

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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