National Renewable Energy Fellowship Scheme(NREFS)

Overview

About NREFS

The National Renewable Energy Fellowship (NREF) picked up a fresh five-year sanction on 11 August 2026. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy conveyed the President's sanction for continuing its Human Resource Development Programme through FY 2026-27 to 2030-31 and set the outlay at Rs 258.83 crore, Rs 58.83 crore of it committed liability inherited from the previous HRD scheme (MNRE administrative approval, HRD Division). NREF is paragraph 2.2.1 inside that approval rather than a scheme carrying guidelines of its own, and the same document sanctions the Ministry's short-term skilling programmes, its laboratory upgradation grants, its internship and its Renewable Energy Chair alongside it.

It is also a deliberately narrow programme, and it has narrowed further. Table 1 of the new approval sets the intake at 33 fellowships a year and 165 across the five years, split as M.Tech 15, JRF 16 and RA/PDF 2 (MNRE administrative approval, FY 2026-27 to 2030-31). The sanction it replaced carried an intake of 75 a year and 375 over FY 2021-22 to 2025-26, and it funded M.Sc students and a direct-entry SRF route that the new table no longer lists (MNRE administrative approval, FY 2021-22 to 2025-26).

One feature of the design settles what a student can actually do about any of this: a candidate never reaches MNRE directly. The Ministry advertises for institutes, sanctions fellowship slots to the ones a committee selects, and then awards the fellowship by name to students the institute forwards, according to the same approval. Your qualifying score decides whether your department is allowed to nominate you. Nothing you do decides whether your department has a slot to nominate you into.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

MNRE runs this on an annual advertisement cycle and publishes no fixed calendar date, so the deadline is whatever the current advertisement carries. The shape of the last full cycle is the best available guide: the Ministry issued its invitation for proposals under the HRD scheme on 27 May 2022 with a closing date of 20 June 2022, then extended applications to 21 July 2022, per the MNRE HRD notifications list. One cycle is not a pattern. It is, though, the only NREF application window MNRE has put a date on, and that window moved once before it shut.

The list on that page runs to the 12 August 2026 approval as its most recent entry and carries no fresh fellowship advertisement issued after it, so the FY 2026-27 cycle's invitation is the document to watch for. One date matters more than the advertisement date once an award is made: the fellowship takes effect from the candidate's date of joining, not from the sanction.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Two gates stand between a candidate and this money, and the first one has nothing to do with the candidate.

The institute gate comes first. Under the new approval, fellowship slots are open to universities, technical institutions and national laboratories with research facilities in MNRE's identified renewable energy thrust areas, and to institutes running M.Tech, M.S or Integrated M.Tech courses in energy studies or renewable energy. Only institutes inside the top 100 of the National Institutional Ranking Framework are considered, and they must also hold faculty expertise and infrastructure in renewable energy. The new approval adds one opening that did not exist before: NIRF relaxation for institutes with new renewable energy postgraduate or PhD programmes, capped at 20% of the total number of new fellowships (MNRE administrative approval, FY 2026-27 to 2030-31).

What that gate looks like in practice is a host list that barely moves. Across the four batch lists MNRE published for FY 2017-18 to 2020-21, twelve institutions between them hold every sanctioned fellowship: IIT Roorkee, IIT Kharagpur, Savitribai Phule Pune University, the University of Lucknow, IIEST Shibpur, Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, Pondicherry University, Cochin University, Anna University, Jadavpur University, Central University of Jharkhand and the National Institute of Bioenergy at Jalandhar (details of fellowships sanctioned under NREF). Only Lucknow, Savitribai Phule Pune and Shri Mata Vaishno Devi appear in all four of those years. If your department has never held a slot, the honest first question is whether it intends to apply for one.

The candidate gate is a qualifying score, and the approval leaves no discretion inside it. Institutes must select students for M.Tech and PhD through a GATE score, a CSIR score, or a CSIR-JRF, AICTE or NET qualification, and the approval states plainly that students without these qualifications will not be eligible. Eligibility for JRF, SRF, RA and PDF otherwise follows the norms of CSIR, DST and UGC, and M.Tech follows AICTE guidelines, so age limits and similar conditions are read off those parent norms rather than set by MNRE. The award is restricted to courses on renewable energy subjects.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

MNRE publishes no exclusion list for this fellowship. Four rules scattered through the approval do that work instead, and each of them shuts a different door.

A candidate without a GATE, CSIR, CSIR-JRF, AICTE or NET qualification is barred outright, in the Ministry's own words. A course that is not on a renewable energy subject is barred, because the fellowships are awarded exclusively for renewable energy courses. Research that is generic is discouraged by design: the approval requires frontier edge technology development with a focused approach rather than technology areas of a general nature. And a fellow on the new industry exposure route may take either the fellowship or an industry stipend for that period, never both (MNRE administrative approval, FY 2026-27 to 2030-31).

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Nothing on this fellowship is renewed once a year. Continuation is a monthly event and the host institution triggers it: MNRE releases the fellowship each month through DBT on receipt of a continuation or attendance report from the institution, with payment running from the candidate's date of joining. The fellow's part in that is showing up; the department's part is sending the report.

Progression is where the tenure actually extends. A JRF runs two years and leads into three years as SRF for the PhD, capped at five years in total, while a post-doctoral RA or PDF appointment runs three years and an M.Tech fellowship runs 20 to 24 months as per the institute's norm, not exceeding two years (MNRE administrative approval, FY 2026-27 to 2030-31). Fellowships sanctioned from FY 2027-28 onwards are allowed to spill past the end of the scheme period for the rest of their duration, so a late award is not a truncated one.

What you get

Award & benefits

The new approval reset every research rate in its financial norms table and left the taught-course rate exactly where it was.

House rent allowance is paid on top for the research categories, as per central government fellowship norms. That table prices JRF, the three post-doctoral levels and M.Tech, and carries no separate SRF line; the funding pattern for JRF, SRF, RA and PDF is set as per DST, MHRD and CSIR guidelines, and the SRF years are treated as the second half of a JRF award that runs to a PhD. The M.Tech rate is the one fellowship rate that did not move: it stood at Rs 12,400 a month in the FY 2021-22 to 2025-26 approval and stands at Rs 12,400 in the FY 2026-27 to 2030-31 approval, while a JRF has gone from Rs 31,000 to Rs 37,000 and the post-doctoral levels from Rs 47,000, Rs 49,000 and Rs 54,000 to Rs 58,000, Rs 61,000 and Rs 67,000 over the same gap.

Rates are not fixed by MNRE and are not meant to be. The approval says they get revised automatically whenever CSIR, AICTE or DST revise theirs, which is why the Ministry issued a separate notice on 9 November 2023 revising the fellowship, scholarship and stipend of JRFs, SRFs and RA scholars rather than reissuing the scheme (MNRE HRD notifications). Treat any rate you read anywhere as the rate on the date of the document that carries it.

• CategoryFellowship (₹/month)HRAContingency (₹/annum)DurationJRF₹31,000/-As per the central govt. norms₹20,000/-Per Month2 yearsSRF₹35,000/--do--do-2 yearsPDF/RA₹47,000/- (Level I), ₹49,000/- (Level II), ₹54,000/- (Level III).-do--do-2 yearsM.Tech/M.S ₹12,400/---20-24 months (as per the institute norm)M.Sc (Renewable Energy)₹4,000/---24 months (as per the institute norms)
• Notes: Flexible Allocation: The number of fellowships in each category (M.Tech, M.Sc, JRF, SRF, RA) is interchangeable based on the quality of research proposals and industry demand. - Monthly Disbursement: All fellowships are disbursed on a monthly basis directly into the beneficiary's bank account via DBT mode upon receipt of attendance/continuation reports from host institutions.

What to prepare

Documents required

What the Ministry itself asks for is short, and it is asked of the institute rather than the student. MNRE's citizen's charter lists the required documents for NREF as the educational qualifications, marksheets, and GATE and NET certificates of the selected students, and puts the applicable fee at nil (Citizen's and Client's Charter, MNRE). Those go up on the HRD portal against slots the institute already holds, once the names have been picked.

The approval prescribes no candidate-facing format beyond that, because the candidate is not the applicant. The one paper the approval and the charter both name is the qualifying score certificate, so the GATE, NET or CSIR original is the item to keep within reach; whatever else a department asks a nominee for belongs to that department's own file.

Step by step

How to apply

No form on this scheme has a student's name at the top of it, which is why an individual finds no application link against it. The route runs through the institution in four moves.

MNRE publishes an advertisement on an annual basis inviting applications from universities and institutes for fellowship slots. The institute applies against that advertisement, online, on the HRD portal at hrd.mnre.gov.in; when the Ministry last issued this invitation it directed the fellowship components to the portal in online mode, and kept the sealed cover offline route only for laboratory upgradation and the Renewable Energy Chair (MNRE invitation for proposals under the HRD scheme). MNRE then sanctions slots to the selected institutes. The institute's research or administrative committee picks the fellows and forwards their details, and the Ministry awards the fellowship by name.

For a candidate, the practical application is therefore an admission and a conversation: get into a department that holds or is applying for a slot, with a qualifying score in hand, and ask the supervisor where the department stands in the current cycle.

Whatever tracking exists belongs to the institution too. The citizen's charter puts the service delivery time frame for NREF at 60 days after submission of proposals, against the HRD portal as the point of submission, so the institute that filed can measure the wait (Citizen's and Client's Charter, MNRE). Fresh advertisements, extensions and rate revisions appear on the Ministry's own HRD notifications page. After an award, the thing to track is not a status page but the monthly continuation report, because that is what releases each payment; a stalled DBT credit is chased at the department first and escalated to the HRD Division after. The charter's own escalation route is the Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System at pgportal.gov.in, where MNRE lists a nodal officer and an appellate authority for the grievances it receives.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Selection happens twice, at two levels, and only the second pass looks at a person.

The institutes are selected by a committee chaired by an eminent scientist or professor, with two experts of professorial rank from reputed academic institutions, the Directors General of NISE, NIWE and NIRE, and the Group Head of the HRD Division as members. The Scientist-in-charge, HRD, is its convener (MNRE administrative approval, FY 2026-27 to 2030-31). That committee is choosing departments, not people.

The fellows are chosen by the institute's own research or administrative committee, against AICTE, CSIR, MHRD and DST norms, and the Ministry then awards on eligibility by name. The institute is also required to keep MNRE apprised of its selection process, so the department's method is reviewable even though the department owns the choice.

One rule cuts across both stages. The number of fellowships in each category is interchangeable, and the approval says it will move with the number of applications received, the quality of the research proposed and demand from industry. A year in which strong PhD proposals arrive can convert M.Tech slots into JRF slots, so the category split in the table is a plan rather than a quota. A committee of senior academicians reviews the programme's progress separately.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The award is classified as a merit based scholarship or fellowship under Cabinet Secretariat OM No. D-12011/01/2025-DBT dated 12 November 2025, which is what fixes its DBT treatment, and it is disbursed monthly into the beneficiary's own bank account (MNRE administrative approval, FY 2026-27 to 2030-31). Payment begins from the date of joining and continues on receipt of the host institution's continuation or attendance report.

The new sanction adds a condition that did not exist in the previous one. Eligible fellows may be placed for industry exposure of 4 to 12 months through academia-industry consortia, and where the partnering company pays a stipend the fellow draws either the fellowship or that stipend for the exposure period. The Ministry frames it as field exposure to utility scale installations and corporate research divisions, so it is an addition to the research plan rather than a break from it.

Get help

Contact

Sanctions for this fellowship are signed out of MNRE's Human Resource Development Division at Atal Akshaya Urja Bhawan, Lodhi Road, New Delhi 110003, over the email address hrd.mnre@gov.in that the August 2026 approval prints beneath the signature. MNRE's citizen's charter names Sh. Rajat Yadav, Under Secretary, HRD, as the officer responsible for the NREF service, and Dr. Vasanta V. Thakur as the grievance redressal authority in case of non-compliance, at Vasanta.thakur@nic.in (Citizen's and Client's Charter, MNRE). Institutional applications and their status sit on the HRD portal at hrd.mnre.gov.in.

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.

Explore more

Related scholarships

References

Sources