National Awards To Teachers (Higher Education)(NATTHE)

Overview

About NATTHE

The National Awards to Teachers (Higher Education) are the Ministry of Education's Teachers' Day honour for faculty who teach beyond school, in colleges, universities and polytechnics. Nobody applies for it the way a student applies for a scholarship. A teacher is nominated, by themselves, by the head of their institution or by a colleague, on the government's Rashtriya Puraskar Portal, and the President presents the award.

There are two categories. Category I is for teachers of higher educational institutions, split into three discipline groups: engineering, technology and architecture; the pure sciences together with medicine and pharmacy; and arts, humanities, social sciences, languages, legal studies, commerce and management. Category II is for polytechnic teachers (Ministry of Education, PIB). For the 2026 round the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) launched the nomination portal, with its Member Secretary designated as the award's Convenor.

The Department named 13 higher education teachers in 2023, 16 in 2024, 21 in 2025 and 21 in 2026.

Central institutions made up most of the latest list. They took 12 of the 21 places in 2026, with IIT Roorkee, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Bhubaneswar, IIT Gandhinagar, IIT Bombay and IIT Kanpur each represented, against five for state universities and colleges and four for polytechnics (Ministry of Education, PIB).

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

The Department runs one round a year, and the last three followed the same shape:

The portal opened on 21 May in 2024 (PIB) and on 26 May in 2026 (AICTE). The 2026 window also ran past its announced date: AICTE's launch notice set 5 July 2026 as the last date, and the Department's awardee release later recorded nominations as open from 26 May to 20 July 2026 (PIB).

The next round has not been announced. Across the three rounds above, the last date announced at launch fell between 20 June and 9 July (PIB; AICTE, 2025 scheme document), so the career profile and the head's certificate are worth preparing before the notice appears.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The nominee must be a regular faculty member of a college, university, higher educational institution or polytechnic in India, with at least five years of full-time teaching, and must not be above 55 years of age on the last date for nominations, as the 2026 AICTE notice states. Someone who was a Vice-Chancellor, Director or Principal earlier is still eligible if they are below 55 and in active service.

Age is measured on the round's closing date, not on the day you submit, so a teacher whose birthday takes them past the limit before the portal closes is outside the rule even if the form went in early. Diploma teaching counts toward the service condition: the current scheme document words it as full-time teaching at the polytechnic and/or undergraduate and/or postgraduate level, where the 2024 edition named only undergraduate and postgraduate teaching.

There is no income ceiling. The award rewards teaching, and the conditions in the current scheme document concern only the post, the length of service, age and any earlier win, with no income, social-category or state-wise test.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

Past winners are now shut out. The current scheme document adds a line that earlier NAT awardees are not eligible to apply, a bar the 2024 edition did not carry.

In practice, the head's certificate is the one condition a nominee does not control. The Vice-Chancellor, Director or Principal must certify on letterhead, under the institution's seal, that no vigilance or departmental enquiry is pending or contemplated against the nominee and that no police or court case is pending, and the scheme document makes this certificate mandatory (Annexure-I of the current scheme document). A teacher facing an open enquiry cannot get it signed.

The same certificate records since when the nominee has been a regular faculty member of the institution, with an employee ID, so the service condition is proved on the head's letterhead, and a guest or contractual engagement is not a regular post. Serving heads of institutions, regular or officiating, are excluded for as long as they hold the post.

The myScheme listing below reproduces the first round's text, which barred self-nomination. Later rounds reversed that: the Ministry's portal launch for the next round listed self-nomination on a singular basis, and the AICTE notice for the current round lists it first among the ways to nominate.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

What carries forward from one round to the next is the nomination, not the prize: an earlier nominee may be nominated again (Ministry of Education, PIB; current scheme document), so a teacher who was not selected can return in a later round as long as they still pass the age and service test. Winners cannot, under the past-awardee bar described in Exclusions.

What you get

Award & benefits

Each awardee receives a medal, a certificate and a cash prize of Rs 50,000, the three items the current scheme document lists under decorations. The Ministry's 2024 ceremony release, which covered the higher education awardees alongside the school and skilling ones, described the medal as silver and the certificate as a certificate of merit, and said awardees would also get an opportunity to interact with the Prime Minister.

The President confers the awards at Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi on 5 September, Teachers' Day (Ministry of Education, PIB), which marks the birth anniversary of Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (AICTE).

The award count in the listing below also comes from the first round's text, including its Category II and III labels. The current split puts polytechnic teachers in Category II, with 10 awards a year (PIB), and that category has had room to spare: four polytechnic teachers were named in 2026 (PIB).

• Cash Prize of ₹ 50,000/-

What to prepare

Documents required

The nomination form, CV and supporting papers in the listing below are the baseline. Four items in the scheme document carry more weight than the rest:

• A career profile of at most 800 words, excluding spaces and paragraphs, written against the scheme's listed points, from creating an optimal learning environment for students to contributing to the National Credit Framework and the National Education Policy; the system accepts only the first 800 words (AICTE, 2025 scheme document; current scheme document).
• A citation of not more than 100 words, which is used to prepare the winner's certificate (AICTE, 2025 scheme document).
• The vigilance clearance and integrity certificate from the head of the institution, on letterhead with the official seal.
• A video clip highlighting your achievements, uploaded to YouTube as a private link (current scheme document).

The career-profile point on the National Credit Framework and the National Education Policy is new in the current scheme document. The same document lets a nominee upload the head's certificate within a month of submitting, using the nomination's unique ID, when it is not ready on the day.

The closest thing to a model profile is a past winner's citation. The Ministry's National Teachers Awards site publishes the higher education awardees' citations for 2023, 2024 and 2025, and they show how winners fitted teaching method, outreach and research into a short space.

Step by step

How to apply

Nominations go through the Rashtriya Puraskar Portal at awards.gov.in and nowhere else; the current scheme document names it as the only route. In order:

1. Decide who nominates. You can nominate yourself, or be nominated by a present or former Vice-Chancellor, Director or Principal, or by a faculty colleague of the institution where you hold regular employment (AICTE).
2. Draft the career profile and citation offline before you open the form, because the word caps are enforced by the system.
3. Ask the head of your institution for the signed vigilance and integrity certificate early, since the portal also sends the head an email when the nomination is submitted.
4. Register on the portal, sign in, choose the Department of Higher Education's National Award to Teachers from the ongoing nominations, complete every field, upload the certificate and video link, and submit with the system-generated OTP.

Each nomination carries a unique ID on the portal, which is also how a late certificate is attached (current scheme document). Neither scheme document describes a public status tracker. Shortlisted nominees are called for an online interaction with the jury, and the final list appears as a Ministry release in late August: 28 August 2024, 26 August 2025 and 24 August 2026. Because this is a prize and not a student scholarship, there is no scholarship-portal payment status to follow.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Selection runs in two steps. Category-wise Search-cum-Screening Committees, drawn from retired faculty, industry and domain experts, educationists, national award winners and the social sector, shortlist from the career profiles and may also nominate an outstanding teacher on their own. A five-member jury of academic leaders, academicians and higher education policy planners then holds an online interaction with each shortlisted nominee and settles the awardees in each category (current scheme document; AICTE).

Four parameters are scored: teaching-learning effectiveness, outreach activities, research and innovation, and sponsored research, faculty development programmes and consultancy. The Ministry's awardee releases say teaching-learning effectiveness and outreach carry the preponderant weightage (PIB, 2024; PIB, 2025). The current scheme document sets one split for diploma teaching and another for UG, PG and PhD teaching, and gives the research-side criteria less weight in UG-only colleges and polytechnics than in institutes that run PG and PhD programmes.

Publication counts, patents granted and Google Scholar citation data are all listed under research and innovation, not under teaching, so a profile built mainly on papers is competing for the smaller share (current scheme document). The evidence the document lists under teaching effectiveness is concrete: new courses or MOOC and NPTEL content created, new laboratory experiments, student mentoring, tutorials and problem solving for weak students, and work on NBA, NAAC or NIRF accreditation.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

Submission is tied to the head of the institution: the portal uses a system-generated OTP and sends the head an email, so even a self-nomination is visible to them (current scheme document). A nomination without the head's certificate is incomplete, whether the certificate is uploaded with the form or within a month afterwards, and nominations received after the due date are not considered.

Get help

Contact

For the 2026 round the portal listed an AICTE helpdesk for this award: email helpdesknataward26@aicte-india.org and phone 01129581051, from 9:00 to 17:30 on working days, Monday to Friday (Rashtriya Puraskar Portal). Login, registration or OTP faults on the portal itself go to the portal's technical support address, techsupport-awards@mha.gov.in, which the same listing gives.

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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