“Ishan Uday” Special Scholarship Scheme For North Eastern Region(IUSSSNER)

Overview

About IUSSSNER

Ishan Uday is running, and the rate it pays is not the rate its own scheme summaries still carry. UGC's student scholarship listing puts the award at Rs 80,000 per annum for 10,000 students a year, with a tenure of 3 to 5 years, on the page it maintains for the North Eastern Region. What moves from year to year is not the money but the window, and the window is the part a student has to check on the day.

The scheme is running and its merit lists are still being signed. The Mizoram Scholarship Board posted the state's Ishan Uday 2024-2025 result in September 2025, recording 651 fresh applicants from Mizoram against 192 selections, 115 of them in Humanity and Social Science and 77 in Science. Those are one state's figures, published by that state's board, and not the national count.

A cycle's dates live on the scheme's own card rather than in the guidelines, which fix only that applications are invited once a year. On NSP's list of schemes headed Academic Year 2026-27, the UGC card for "Ishan Uday Special Scholarship Scheme For NER (Merit Based Scheme)" prints five stage dates: Scheme Open from 16-09-2026, Student Application Open till 31-10-2026, Defective Application Verification Open till 15-11-2026, Institute Verification Open till 15-11-2026 and DNO/SNO/MNO Verification Open till 30-11-2026. Only the second of those belongs to the student. The three after it are the college's and the nodal officers', and they are what a form filed late in the student window is then racing. UGC's own page for the scheme prints no date at all and gives the National Scholarship Portal as its Remark, so the card is where a cycle's deadlines are published and where the next cycle's will appear.

Reach is what a one-line directory entry gets wrong most often. Domicile of any North Eastern state qualifies, and UGC's scheme FAQ answers it in terms: students with North Eastern domicile are eligible, with the parental income test applied on top. All eight states of the region count, Sikkim included, and no single state is favoured in the eligibility test itself.

NSP hosts two Ishan Uday guideline documents, and they disagree about the money. The older set, which NSP still hosts as ISHAN_UDAY_GUIDELINE.pdf and which describes the scheme from its launch in academic session 2014-15, fixes Rs.5400/- per month for a general degree course and Rs.7800/- per month for technical, medical, professional and paramedical courses. The document UGC dates 2021 on its cover, and which the portal now links as the scheme guidelines, replaces that split with a single rate of Rs.8,000/- per month for 10 months in a year, for every eligible programme. Anyone budgeting on the two-rate structure, including the version reproduced in the scheme record further down this page, is budgeting on the superseded document.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

The published record does not always match that November or December pattern. Mizoram's board put up the state's Ishan Uday 2024-2025 merit list in September 2025, well into the next academic year, so a student who has applied should plan for a wait measured in seasons rather than weeks.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The current guidelines test where you finished school, not only where you live. The scholarship is open to students who passed Class XII or equivalent from a school situated within the North Eastern Region through a recognised board including CBSE, ICSE or NIOS, and who also hold a valid domicile certificate of any NER state. Parental income has to be below Rs. 04.50 lakh per annum, and the 2021 guidelines state that students whose parents earn that amount or more are not eligible.

Admission timing is the condition students misread most often. Only those already admitted to the first year of a UG degree programme are eligible, and the same guidelines put it as a closed door: a student admitted in a given academic year is eligible for selection in that year only. There is no catching up in year two.

The institution has to qualify as well. Four kinds of it are listed in the current guidelines, and a college outside all four cannot carry the claim: one covered by section 2(f) of the UGC Act, 1956 and holding valid NAAC accreditation; a deemed to be university under section 3 of that Act, also NAAC accredited; a degree-awarding body fully funded by the Central or a State Government; and an Institution of National Importance. That NAAC condition is not historic wording. The guidelines carry a footnote putting it into effect from AY2025-26, so it binds the applications being invited now rather than some future cycle, and it is the single change most likely to move a college in or out of the scheme. A valid AISHE code is separately mandatory for the institution to reach the portal at all.

For integrated and dual degree programmes the scholarship is payable for the UG component only, and it is available for a first UG degree only. A student who already holds a degree cannot apply.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

Mode of study is the sharpest bar. Students pursuing a UG programme through open, distance, correspondence, private or part-time mode are outside the scheme, and UGC's FAQ repeats it as a one-line no: this scholarship is for regular mode students only.

Admission route matters too. Students who gained admission through management quota are not eligible, per the current guidelines. The older guidelines also shut out programmes that do not lead to a degree, which is why a diploma at a polytechnic does not qualify however good the marks.

The one-benefit rule is a condition rather than a straight exclusion, and it has an escape hatch worth knowing. Under the current guidelines, a student already holding another scholarship may still apply, provided the existing award is declared in the application. If selected, they have to give up either the earlier benefit or the Ishan Uday selection. Concealing it is what turns a declaration problem into a cancellation.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Nothing rolls over on its own here. The scholarship continues through the first degree course subject to good conduct and prescribed attendance, and it is renewed for the next year of study on successful completion of the first year, but the student still has to file a Renewal application on the portal each year. UGC's FAQ is blunt about the consequence: scholarship for subsequent years will not be processed without successful submission of the renewal application.

Two things end it outright. Failing to be promoted to the next class or level forfeits the scholarship. So does changing the course of study, and the 2021 guidelines extend that to changing the institution as well, with the forfeiture running from the date of the change rather than the end of the year. The older document barred only a change of course, so a student reading a stale copy can miss the transfer clause entirely.

The portal normally opens fresh and renewal applications at the same time, and only applications verified by the institution inside the given time frame are accepted, so a renewal filed on the last evening still depends on the college acting. Institutions upload a scanned renewal certificate in the prescribed format when they verify.

What you get

Award & benefits

The 10,000 slots are a ceiling, not a promise that 10,000 awards get made. Answering Rajya Sabha Unstarred Question No. 2772 on 22.12.2021, the Ministry of Education tabled the state-wise record of fresh candidates selected: 10000 in 2015-16 and again in 2016-17, then 9800 in 2017-18, 8051 in 2018-19 and 6236 in 2019-20. The same reply put expenditure on the scheme, fresh and renewal awards counted together, at 185.18 crore rupees in 2020-21, met from UGC's open budget, and recorded that the scheme moved onto the National Scholarship Portal from the selection year 2017-18.

Money goes to the student, not to the college. UGC is the releasing body here, the destination has to be a bank account seeded with Aadhaar, and PFMS carries the Direct Benefit Transfer out. The award runs from the date of joining the course as certified by the university, institution or college.

• UGC will award 10,000 (ten thousand) fresh scholarships per year.
• ₹5,400/- per month for general degree courses and ₹7,800/- per month for technical/medical/professional/paramedical courses.
• The scholar would be awarded from the date of joining the course, as certified by the University/Institution/ College.
• Scholarship (as certified by the institutions identified under this scheme) will be paid to the selected students by the UGC through DBT (Direct Benefit Transfer) Mode and will be transferred to the Bank account of the beneficiaries. This procedure will be completed through the PFMS.

What to prepare

Documents required

The portal application itself is light on uploads. The current guidelines instruct students not to upload any certificate or affidavit while submitting the online application, and to hand the documents to their institution instead so that it can verify the claim. The institution then uploads a scanned verification certificate in UGC's prescribed format.

What the college will ask for is the domicile certificate or permanent resident certificate and the income certificate, both issued by the competent authority, plus any affidavits it needs to satisfy itself on eligibility. The institution has to retain those papers for the scholarship period plus two years afterwards, and UGC reserves the right to call for any student's documents at any time.

Renewal has its own paper. The annual progress report and proof of continuation of study are uploaded or verified by the university, institution or college, not by the student. A KYC compliant bank account in the student's own name is the other quiet requirement, because a name or IFSC mismatch stops the payment even after selection.

Step by step

How to apply

The scheme takes applications in a single annual round, and the notice that the round has begun goes up on UGC's own website as well as on the National Scholarship Portal, where the form itself lives. There is no offline route. The form sits behind a One Time Registration, which the portal describes as a unique 14-digit number issued on the basis of Aadhaar or an Aadhaar Enrolment ID and applicable for the entire academic career of the student, so it is generated once rather than every year.

There is no partial credit at the front end. An incomplete form is disposed of summarily, and one the institution has not verified never enters the pool a merit list is drawn from. Two of the conditions belong to the college rather than to the student. It needs a valid AISHE code to reach NSP at all, and the 2021 guidelines require it to ensure that the nomenclature and duration of its courses follow the UGC Notification on Specification of Degrees, 2014, which is where an oddly named local programme can quietly fail.

Verification is where most applications die quietly. UGC's FAQ sets the order: the institute nodal officer verifies first, the state nodal officer second, and only then is the merit list prepared. Submitting is not qualifying.

Tracking the Application and the Payment

Selection and payment are answered by two different systems, and on this scheme the payer at the second stage is UGC itself rather than a state treasury. Whether a form has cleared its two verifiers is a question for the student's own portal login, and the deadlines it is racing, for submission and for verification at institute, district and state level, are displayed on NSP, which UGC's FAQ names as the place those dates live.

Whether the money has moved is a bank-account question rather than an application one, because the release runs through PFMS. The portal's own Track Your Payment link opens the Public Financial Management System instead of the scholarship dashboard, and its companion links for checking Aadhaar seeding cover the failure that stops a sanctioned award after everything else has gone right. A place on a merit list and a credit in the account are separate events, and the guidelines name the usual cause of the gap: a mismatch between the student's name, the bank account number and the IFSC code.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Selection is purely on state-wise merit among the students who applied, with no interview and no separate test. Before merit is applied, the slots are split by discipline: the FAQ records that 50% of slots are earmarked for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Law and Management, and the other 50% for Science, Engineering and Technology, medical, technical, agriculture and forestry programmes. That is why the result reaches a state as two lists rather than one, as the Mizoram Scholarship Board's 2024-2025 notice shows, with separate Humanity and Social Science and Science files.

Where candidates sit level at the bottom of a state list on Class XII marks, the guidelines shortlist further on Class X marks, and if the list is still longer than the slots, on age, with older candidates preferred over younger ones.

One rule sits only in the older document. It allocates the slots to each state on the population recorded in the latest census, and redistributes the slots left vacant in one state equitably among the others (the earlier guidelines). The 2021 guidelines do not restate it, so a student should not treat a state quota as a published number to plan against.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

A student may hold only one scholarship at a time under this scheme, and the guidelines make Aadhaar mandatory for disbursal because it is used as the identifier for releasing the grant and the bank account has to be Aadhaar linked. Applications cannot be edited after the closing date.

An application can be cancelled after institutional verification if the student or the institution has given wrong or misleading information on the portal. The guidelines also make it clear that no correspondence is entertained about wrong information once the institution has verified the form, which puts the burden of accuracy on the student at the filling stage rather than at appeal. Wrong or misleading information carries a further consequence for the student: UGC reserves the right to recover the full amount already paid, with interest.

Get help

Contact

UGC administers and monitors the scheme itself, so the commission rather than a state directorate is the office of record for it. Write to contact.ugc@nic.in, or telephone 011-23604446 or 011-23604200; the postal address carried on UGC's scholarship pages is Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, New Delhi - 110002.

For anything about a submitted application, the scheme-wise nodal officer is the faster route, and UGC's FAQ points students to the scheme-wise list of nodal officers published under the Public link on the National Scholarship Portal.

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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References

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