Merit cum Means Scholarship: Engineering University(MCMSEC)

Overview

About MCMSEC

The person who decides this award is your Principal. Not a portal, not a district office, not the Directorate. Chhattisgarh's Integrated Scholarship Rules of 2013 put the sanctioning power for both a fresh grant and every later renewal in the hands of the head of the institution where the student is enrolled, and set the money at Rs 1,000 a month for a B.E. student who cleared the 12th with 45 percent and whose father or guardian earns no more than Rs 2,50,000 a year, as printed in the Chhattisgarh Rajpatra of 24 June 2013. Because the sanction never leaves the campus, there is no login to check, no state calendar to wait for, and no reference number anyone can quote back to you.

The scheme belongs to the Department of Technical Education, Manpower Planning, Science and Technology, and it reaches students through the notification the department issued from Mahanadi Bhawan, Nava Raipur on 21 June 2013. The rules it carries are titled the Integrated Scholarship Rules 2013 (Revised), they came into force on 1 July 2013, and they cancelled every earlier rule and order on the subject while letting students already drawing an older award move to the increased rate for the rest of their academic period, per the notification's opening paragraph.

One naming detail is worth clearing up before anything else, because it changes who should bother applying. Scheme listings render this award as "Engineering University". The schedule inside the gazette calls it yogyata sah sadhan chhatravritti, engineering mahavidyalaya, which is engineering college, and the attached Annexure 1 names three of them: the government engineering colleges at Bilaspur, Jagdalpur and Raipur.

That distinction matters more than a translation quibble, because the scheme record and the gazette do not agree about who qualifies. The record describes the award as being for study at a recognised engineering university in Chhattisgarh and answers, in its own question set, that a private college counts if it is recognised or AICTE approved. The notification opens by confining the rules to Chhattisgarh-resident students studying in government technical institutions, and its third general condition repeats that scholarships go only to students at a recognised government educational institution located in the state. Where the two differ, the gazette is the instrument and the listing is a summary of it, so treat a private college as outside this award and ask the Directorate before you rely on the looser wording.

Rate vintage matters here more than usual. Rs 1,000 a month is the 2013 figure, and it is the figure the scheme record still publishes today, so a student should read it as a fixed monthly stipend that has stayed where the 2013 schedule left it rather than as an indexed amount.

The number of awards is not fixed either, and the rules say so plainly. The note beneath the schedule sets the merit-cum-means count at an institution's total admission capacity divided by 15, against divided by 60 for the plain Merit award, and allows the count to rise in the same proportion if a college's sanctioned intake rises in a given year, according to the note under the schedule.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

The gazette hands the calendar to your college in one line: for this award, the last date is fixed by the Principal of the institution concerned. That is not a gap in the rules, it is the rule, and it means the only date that binds you is the one printed on your own college's circular for the session you are in.

What that looks like in practice is visible in the notices Government Engineering College Raipur has filed on its scholarships page, which share a form and a mark line but not a deadline. Its 2024-25 circular gave students until 25 October 2024 to deposit the completed form at the scholarship section, warning that an application arriving afterwards would not be considered at all. The 2023-24 circular set the same calendar day a year earlier, 25 October 2023. The 2022-23 circular ran later than both, closing on 5 December 2022.

Three things are worth taking from that sequence. The window is short, a matter of weeks between the notice appearing and the counter closing, so a notice missed on a board is a year missed. It falls in the first half of the odd semester rather than at admission time. And it moved by more than a month across those sessions, which is exactly what a Principal-set date does and exactly why no state-level calendar for this award exists to be published.

No notice for a session after 2024-25 has appeared on that page as this is written, while post-matric, AICTE and tuition fee waiver notices for later sessions have. Treat the dates above as the pattern to watch rather than as dates that are still open, and ask the scholarship section directly for the current session's circular.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Four tests decide it, and all four have to hold at once. You are a native resident of Chhattisgarh. You passed the 10+2 examination from a recognised institution located in Chhattisgarh with at least 45 percent marks. Your father's or guardian's total annual income does not cross Rs 2,50,000. And you are enrolled in a B.E. programme at one of the state's government engineering colleges, on the strength of an allotment made by the Directorate of Technical Education.

The schedule splits the award into three lines rather than one: students of both sexes, a separate line reserved for girl students, and a line for diploma holders newly admitted to the second year of B.E. through lateral entry. A candidate does not choose the line, the college applies it while drawing up the list.

Rule 8 then adds a filter that catches applicants late, because it turns on where you sat the board examination rather than where your family lives. One narrow category of applicant is written out of that restriction altogether, and the FAQ below sets out who.

Why the College Notice Says 60 Percent

The mark line is the thing students get wrong most often, and the reason is a shared form rather than a contradiction. Government Engineering College Raipur, which now carries the name Chhattisgarh Institute of Technology, runs one application window covering the Merit and the Merit-cum-Means awards together, and the college's 2024-25 notice addresses itself to first and second year students who scored above 60 percent in class 12 or the diploma, adding at the foot that the income limit for the Merit-cum-Means award is 2.50 lakh.

Read against the gazette, that 60 belongs to the other award on the form. The schedule prints two engineering college lines paying Rs 1,000 a month: the Merit scholarship, which asks 60 percent and applies no income bar at all, and the Merit-cum-Means scholarship, which asks 45 percent and adds the Rs 2,50,000 ceiling. A student sitting between the two figures reads a notice worded for the higher one and quietly writes the year off, when the statutory bar for the award with the income test is the lower one. If your 12th percentage falls in that band, put the question to the scholarship section in writing rather than deciding for yourself that the notice has excluded you.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

Four things can sink an application or end a running award, and not one of them is a marks or an income test. They sit in the body of the rules rather than in a separate list of bars, which is why they rarely surface on a scheme listing.

Where you study can end it even if nothing about you changes. Rule 10 carries a scholarship across a transfer from one government institution to another inside the state, for the unexpired period and provided the student stays on the same branch and course. Move to a private or autonomous institution and eligibility terminates outright, which is the sharpest expression anywhere in the rules of the government-institution condition.

Employment is the second bar. A student in full-time work cannot hold this scholarship, and the only relaxation runs the other way: a student already enrolled at a recognised institution and already drawing a scholarship may be permitted to take part-time work. Nor may anyone hold two scholarships at once without special sanction from the government, though a fee concession granted by their own institution may continue alongside.

Conduct and attendance make up the third. Good conduct and regular attendance are stated conditions for the award continuing, and the head of the institution may suspend or cancel it on habitual irregularity, misbehaviour, participation in a strike, or any other adverse report. A student unhappy with that decision may appeal to the Director for its withdrawal, which is the one point in the whole process where the Directorate, and not the college, has the last word.

The fourth constraint is budgetary rather than personal. All scholarships under these rules are limited to the budget provision available for them, so a candidate can satisfy every condition and still be waiting on a number the college does not have.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Renewal is annual, it is done by the Principal, and the test is stricter than the entry test. The rules define satisfactory progress as passing the annual examination in the first attempt, and the renewal note spells out what that means for a scholarship holder: the previous class has to be cleared fully, in all subjects, at the first attempt.

A supplementary result does not automatically end it. The suspension and cancellation rules suspend the award when a holder gets a compartment or supplementary, renew it if that examination is cleared within the same year, and cancel it if it is not. The renewal note adds the detail that matters for your bank balance: such a renewal runs from the date of passing, not from the start of the session.

Failing the annual examination cancels the award in every case the rules do not expressly carve out. Illness is handled on its own footing. A student who could not sit some papers of the annual examination because of illness can have the award renewed for the same course in the following academic year on producing a medical certificate from an authorised medical officer, endorsed by the District Medical Board of the district where the student studies.

What you actually hand in for renewal is short: an application to the Principal with a copy of the marksheet issued by the board or university for the previous class. There is no separate renewal portal and no departmental form to chase.

What you get

Award & benefits

The award pays Rs 1,000 per month to a student on the engineering college line of the schedule, and the rules are unusually specific about the shape of that payment. Rule 11 makes every scholarship payable for a 10-month academic session, with the actual payment running each year from the date the student takes admission to the end of April. Rule 12 then makes each monthly payment conditional on satisfactory progress, regular attendance and good conduct, appoints the head of the institution as the drawing and disbursing officer, and requires the money to reach the student by the 10th of the following month once the prescribed conditions are met.

Two practical consequences follow. The money is not a lump sum and does not arrive as one, and a student whose attendance has slipped can lose a month without the award itself being cancelled. The award otherwise continues for the duration of the course it was granted for, and the rules add a plain condition on top: payment keeps coming as long as the student's name stays on an institution's attendance register.

How many such awards a college holds is fixed in Annexure 1 of the same gazette, which prints the count in force before the revision beside the revised count applicable from session 2013-14. The revised column is the one that has stood since:

The annexure carries its own subtotal line beneath those nine cells, and it reads 76 revised against 52 before the revision, so that total is the gazette's arithmetic rather than ours. Read it as the sanctioned shape of the scheme in 2013 rather than as this year's vacancy count, since the divisor rule allows a college's number to move with its intake. One caution about quoting that number loose: the same annexure closes with an all-schemes grand total where 76 turns up again as the pre-revision figure, this time against 100, so the row a 76 came from decides what it means.

• Scholarship of ₹1,000/- per month.

What to prepare

Documents required

The state rules ask only for an application in the prescribed form with marksheets and the necessary certificates. The working list is the one the college prints on its circular, and it separates what everyone attaches from what only some applicants attach.

Two things in that list are easy to misjudge. The income certificate is the single document that separates a merit-cum-means application from a plain merit one, and the year the college wants can be pinned to the session: the 2024-25 notice asks for the certificate for 2023-24, where the notices for the two sessions before it named no year at all, so an older certificate sitting in your file is worth checking rather than assuming. The scheme record also marks the award as not routed through DBT, and the bank passbook page carrying the IFSC code is what the college holds in place of a seeded account.

Step by step

How to apply

The application is on paper, start to finish. The rules say the form is obtained from the office of the institution, filled in the prescribed format, and submitted to the Principal along with the marksheets and required certificates. At Raipur the practice is a shade more specific: the student collects the form from their own branch, fills it completely, and deposits it at the scholarship section of the college.

Nothing about this award is transacted on a screen. The scheme record lists offline as the only application mode and publishes no application URL, so a student hunting for a login page is hunting for something that was never built. What does exist online is the notice: the college is asked to upload each year's circular to its own website, and Raipur files them on its scholarships page alongside the post-matric, AICTE and tuition fee waiver notices.

Where the Notice Lands, and How to Chase the Money

The circular names its own distribution route, which is the closest thing this scheme has to a tracking mechanism. Copies go to every head of department, with a request that students under them be told through their WhatsApp group; to the website in-charge for upload; and to the notice boards of the scholarship section, the student section, the Principal's chamber and each department.

That gives you two different questions and one counter to ask them at. Whether your form was accepted and whether you made the list is a scholarship-section question, because that is where the file physically sits and where the sanction is signed. Whether the money has moved is a different matter, and here the rules give you something firmer than a status screen: your Principal is the drawing and disbursing officer, the payment cycle is monthly, and a month's payment is due by the 10th of the month after it. If a month has passed that date with nothing credited, you are asking about a specific disbursement rather than about your application, and it is worth saying so at the counter.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Selection is a merit list drawn within the number allotted to the institution, and the order of filling is written down. The merit-cum-means line for students of both sexes is filled first, and if a girl student's name reaches that list on merit she is not counted again against the line reserved only for girls, which quietly protects the reserved line from being absorbed by the general one.

A mid-year vacancy is not re-advertised. Rule 7 lets the sanctioning authority hand the balance of the term straight to whoever stands next on the list already drawn. For a vacant merit-cum-means award the schedule attaches its own entry test, set at a minimum of 45 percent in the examination the candidate passed the previous year, and it is the head of the institution who notifies that a vacancy exists, per the vacancy clauses in the rules.

One rule closes the door on stacking. A student is eligible for only one type of scholarship under this schedule, so a candidate who qualifies on both merit and merit-cum-means grounds is placed on one of them, not both.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

Sanction is not automatic once the form is in. The schedule requires the head of the institution to recommend the application and to certify that the student will be able to complete their lectures and coursework over the remaining period of study, which makes attendance a condition at the point of grant and not only at renewal.

The award is also tied to enrolment in a live way. Payment continues while the student's name is on the institution's attendance register, and the rules count an award as vacant the moment the holder fails, is cancelled for misconduct, or leaves the specific course for which the scholarship was granted.

Above all of it sits the budget clause, and it is worth understanding what it does. The rules grant these scholarships subject to the conditions in the attached schedule and limit them to the budget provision available, which means the annexure numbers describe a ceiling the state has sanctioned rather than a guarantee that every allotted award will be filled in a given year. A complete, eligible, well-ranked file is still a claim on a finite pot.

Get help

Contact

The office to approach is your own college's scholarship section, since that is where the form is issued, deposited and sanctioned. At Government Engineering College Raipur, now Chhattisgarh Institute of Technology, the institute publishes the number 0771-2972963 and the address principal@gecraipur.ac.in on its own website. The other two colleges named in the annexure keep their own sites at Government Engineering College Bilaspur and Government Engineering College Jagdalpur, each with a scholarship section of its own.

The Directorate of Technical Education at cgdteraipur.cgstate.gov.in is the publisher of the rules rather than a counter for applicants, and it is worth knowing that its site has been returning a server error rather than pages, which is why the gazette notification is cited here through an Internet Archive capture. If you need the rules themselves and the Directorate's site is still down, the archived copy is the document to take to your college office.

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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