National Career Service Centers For SC/STs (erstwhile Coaching-cum-Guidance Centre for SC/STs)(NCSCSCST)

Overview

About NCSCSCST

This is not a scholarship that lands in a bank account against a college fee. What the Ministry of Labour and Employment funds under the National Career Service Centres for SC/STs is a seat: the better part of a year of classroom coaching or computer training at one of 25 centres that the Directorate General of Employment runs as its own subordinate offices, with a small monthly payment attached to attendance rather than to marks. Whether you can use the scheme at all turns on something the eligibility list never mentions, which is whether your state has a centre.

The centres still carry their old identity in their name because they began life as Coaching-cum-Guidance Centres. The trigger was the Elayaperumal Committee of 1969, which asked State Directors of Employment and Training to run typing, stenography and accountancy courses so that Scheduled Caste applicants would be more acceptable to public and private employers, and to add short courses on general knowledge and interview technique (Directorate General of Employment). The scheme itself opened in 1969-70 as a pilot at four centres and was then extended to nineteen more states in phases (DBT MIS Portal for NCSC).

Geography is the part that decides most applications. A centre exists where a state or union territory agreed to provide rent-free premises of roughly 2500 square feet, so the network is uneven rather than national. These are the states and union territories that have one, and the city it sits in.

Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Sikkim, Tripura and Uttarakhand are not on that list, and neither is any union territory other than Delhi, Puducherry and Jammu and Kashmir. A jobseeker from those states has no centre of this scheme to walk into.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

There is no national calendar for this scheme. Each centre announces its own phase, and the two announcements that are on the public record show how tight the window can be.

Bengaluru's window ran 15 days and opened and shut inside the same month (PIB, 15 May 2025). Chennai gave about seven weeks from the announcement, but only began issuing forms on 2 May 2017, a week into that period (PIB, 25 April 2017). Neither was announced anywhere central, so the habit that works is a standing call to the Sub-Regional Employment Officer for your state and a periodic look at the PIB regional feed that carried both of these.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The written conditions are short and the one that stops people is not the income line. A centre works off the Live Register of the Employment Exchange, which is why registration there comes before anything else: the typing and shorthand practice exists specifically so that registrants do not lose the speed they already have while they wait on that register (DGE). If you have never registered at your district exchange, you are not yet an applicant.

The academic and income floors are set nationally. A 2025 notice from the Bengaluru centre restates them plainly: the minimum qualification for any coaching or course is a pass at 10+2, and family annual income must not be more than Rs 3 lakh a year (Press Information Bureau, 15 May 2025). Only Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe jobseekers are covered here, which is a real difference from the coaching schemes run out of the social justice ministry.

Age is the condition that is missing from the national description and present in the paperwork. Chennai's 2017 notification required candidates for its special coaching to be under 27, and set a band of 18 to 30 for its one-year O Level computer software training (PIB, 25 April 2017). That band belongs to that phase at that centre and to nothing else. Read the notification for the intake you are applying to rather than assuming the national text is the whole test.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

DGE prints no bar list for these centres, and neither of the two centre notices on the public record adds one. What narrows the field instead is the eligibility test plus whatever age band a centre attaches to the phase it is advertising, so a jobseeker who meets every condition on the national list can still sit outside the window one centre drew that year.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Renewal has no meaning here: a seat in a phase either exists or it does not, and no yearly continuation form stands between the two. A centre runs a course through and then opens a fresh intake as a numbered phase: Chennai was advertising the 24th phase of its special coaching alongside the 10th phase of its O Level software training in 2017 (PIB, 25 April 2017). Length is set by the phase and not by a national rule, 11 months for that Chennai coaching against the one year each of the five courses Bengaluru advertised in 2025 carried (PIB, 15 May 2025).

What you get

Award & benefits

Almost all of the value here is in kind. The money is a stipend that keeps a candidate in class, not a payment that covers a course, because there is no course fee to cover in the first place (PIB, 2025).

The Group C target is worth reading literally. Bengaluru's 2025 special coaching phase was built around the Staff Selection Commission's Stenographer Group C posts, and the computer element exists because the skill test for Lower Division Clerk and Stenographer recruitment is now conducted on a computer.

The monthly figure has not always been what it is now, which matters when an older notice turns up in a search. Chennai was offering Rs 500 a month on both of its courses in 2017 (PIB, 25 April 2017); the figure DGE publishes today, and the one the Bengaluru notice carried, is Rs 1,000 (DGE, PIB, 15 May 2025).

• The scheme offers Vocational Guidance and Career Counselling Services to educated SC/ST jobseekers.
• The scheme provides Practice in Typing and Shorthand to ensure registrants maintain their speed while waiting on the Live Register of Employment Exchanges.
• The scheme offers a Special Coaching Scheme to prepare candidates for competitive examinations and selection tests for Group “C” or equivalent posts (e.g., General English, General Awareness, Computer Training).
• The scheme provides Computer Training Courses through outsourcing, including ‘O’ Level Software/Hardware training, Office Automation, and Cyber Secured Web Development.
• The scheme provides a monthly stipend of ₹1,000/- per candidate.
• The scheme provides free books and stationery worth ₹1,000/- per candidate for the entire course.
• _The stipend is paid through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT), subject to the candidate maintaining 80% attendance in a particular month._

What to prepare

Documents required

The set is ordinary and the order in which you get it is not. The Employment Exchange registration card is the one document you cannot produce on the day, since it has to be earned by registering at the district exchange first; everything else is paperwork you either hold or can obtain from a revenue office.

The income certificate has to speak to the family's annual income against the Rs 3 lakh ceiling rather than to your own earnings, and the bank account details exist for the stipend rather than for any fee, because the payment reaches you by Direct Benefit Transfer. Copies go in self-attested, and the one cycle that spelt out the handover, Bengaluru in 2025, took them on paper with the filled form at the centre's address rather than as uploads (PIB, 15 May 2025).

Step by step

How to apply

You apply to a named centre, not to a national portal. The myScheme record lists the application mode as offline and carries no application URL, and the 2025 Bengaluru cycle shows what that means in practice: the centre invited applications for its five training courses and one special coaching scheme, issued the form through its own email address, and asked for the filled form with self-attested documents at the Sub-Regional Employment Officer's office on the Government Model ITI (Men) campus at Dairy Circle (PIB, 15 May 2025). Nothing about that step happens online.

Where the Stipend Record Lives Once You Are Enrolled

The department's own system for this scheme is the DBT MIS Portal for National Career Service Centres, at dbtdge.ncs.gov.in. Its sign-up form has a separate SC/ST tab, asks for your name, date of birth, email address, mobile number and a password, and files the account against a financial year (DBT MIS Portal). The login screen then wants a Registration Id, your date of birth and that password, on an SC/ST User tab that sits apart from the DA User, SC/ST Department, DA Department and Stock Management tabs (DBT MIS Portal login). Keep the Registration Id the sign-up hands back, because it is the only handle that screen accepts.

Do not expect the portal to explain the scheme while you are there. Its Eligibility Criteria, Application Process, Benefits, Dashboard, FAQs and Helpline Numbers menu items all land on a Coming Soon page (DBT MIS Portal), and the myScheme record still gives the application mode as offline with no application URL. The paper form at the centre remains the application; the portal is where the stipend record sits afterwards.

For anything the portal will not answer, the multilingual National Career Service helpline runs on 1514 from Tuesday to Sunday between 8 AM and 8 PM (DGE), and every centre's landline, mobile number and email are published against its address.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Neither DGE nor either centre notice says how a phase is actually filled. Both notices name a fixed set of courses, invite applications for a few weeks, and then speak of selected candidates without printing anywhere whether the cut turns on marks, on the order in which forms arrive, or on an interview. Until a notice says otherwise, read the eligibility conditions as the whole of the published test and put the question to the Sub-Regional Employment Officer whose desk the form goes to.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

Attendance is the live condition. The stipend is released for a month only where the candidate has kept 80% attendance in that month, and it moves by Direct Benefit Transfer, so a bank account that is not working stops the payment even though it does not affect the seat (DGE). Books and stationery are supplied rather than reimbursed, so there is no bill to claim.

Two things about the centres themselves are worth knowing before you rely on an address. The premises are the state government's contribution, which means a centre can move when that arrangement changes, and the Himachal Pradesh centre is listed at Una with its former home at Mandi noted in brackets. Naming lags the same way: the scheme text still calls the Arunachal Pradesh centre Naharlagun while the address printed beside it is at Itanagar, so a search on one name misses the other. Officers move too: the DGE publishes a steady run of office orders reassigning charge of individual centres, most recently a work allocation order dated 29 June 2026 (DGE, General NCSC SC/ST Reports).

Get help

Contact

Each of the 25 centres publishes the name and designation of its officer in charge, a landline, a mobile number and an email address on the scheme page (DGE). The DBT MIS portal keeps a second list of the same officers, and the two disagree in ways that decide whether a posted form reaches a desk. For Chennai the scheme page names Umashankara K.N, while the portal's SC/ST list gives Sreerag G.K at the same telephone and the same Guindy address and puts Umashankara K.N at the Chennai centre for the Differently Abled instead. Delhi reads Thalluru Sudhir on the portal and G.K. Mukherjee on the scheme page, and Bhubaneswar is at Khandagiri on one list and at Toshali Bhawan, Satya Nagar on the other (DBT MIS Portal contacts). Telephone the centre before you post anything to it.

The National Career Service helpline on 1514 covers the wider service, and DGE's own analytical report on these centres prints a toll-free number, 1800-425-1514, on its closing page (Analytical Report of NCSC for SC/ST).

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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