National Scholarship For Post Graduate Studies(NSFPGS)

Overview

About NSFPGS

The University Grants Commission runs this one itself, under the Ministry of Education and out of the National Scholarship Portal, whose scheme list files it under UGC as a merit based scheme. It is not PM-USP, the Department of Higher Education scholarship for college and university students that shares that portal with it; it is not the AICTE PG Scholarship for GATE and GPAT qualifiers, which is filed on AICTE's own PG Scholarship Scheme portal and appears nowhere on the NSP list; and it is not a state award, whatever a state directorate's circular calls it. It is not new either. The portal's scheme FAQ describes it as an umbrella scheme formed by merging four earlier postgraduate scholarships, the PG Indira Gandhi single girl child scholarship, the PG scholarship for university rank holders, the PG scholarship for SC and ST students in professional courses, and the Post Graduate Scholarship for GATE and GPAT qualifiers, in FAQs for National Scholarship for Postgraduate Studies.

UGC publishes the shape of the scheme in three lines on its own scheme page: 10,000 slots per annum, a tenure of two years, and financial assistance of Rs 1,50,000 per annum, disbursed through the National Scholarship Portal, on the Commission's page for the National Scholarship for Post Graduate Studies. The scheme guidelines express the same money differently, as Rs 15,000 per month for 10 months in a year, available to Indian students for two years of higher study inside India leading to a postgraduate degree, in the UGC Guidelines for National Scholarship for Postgraduate Studies.

There is no income condition, and a student who assumes otherwise loses the award by not applying. Asked directly whether any income criteria apply to this scholarship, the scheme FAQ answers with a single word, No. The description that travels with the scheme speaks of meritorious students from economically weaker sections, and that phrase is the origin of a widely repeated income bar that does not exist: no ceiling is published in the guidelines or the FAQ, and the only certificates the guidelines authorise an institution to call for are the ones establishing caste or category.

Where students lose time is on the name, because the portal itself carries the competition. The same scheme list holds PM-USP for college and university students under the Department of Higher Education, an ICAR Post Graduate Scholarship, and a stipend scheme for postgraduate study at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, none of which is this one; UGC's own site still keeps a live page for the PG Indira Gandhi Scholarship for Single Girl Child, one of the four schemes the FAQ says was merged away. Under UGC on the portal there are exactly two entries, this scheme and Ishan Uday for the North Eastern Region, and the four names in the FAQ are what this one replaced rather than rivals sitting beside it.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

Applications open once a year, and the guidelines fix the shape of that window without fixing its dates: those appear on the scheme's own card on NSP, cycle by cycle. A 2026-27 cycle has been running on the National Scholarship Portal since 1 June 2026. Most of the schemes that are actually running there close student applications on 31-10-2026 and institute verification on 15-11-2026, according to the stage dates printed against each card on the portal's scheme list.

This scheme joined that calendar late. The UGC card for the National Scholarship for Post Graduate Studies on the portal's scheme list now prints dates of its own: the scheme opens on 16-09-2026 and student applications run to 31-10-2026. The verification stages printed beside them close later, institute verification on 15-11-2026 and district, state or ministry verification on 30-11-2026 (Schemes on NSP). A card that sat unopened for months while the rest of the portal ran is the reason a first year postgraduate should be watching this scheme from admission onwards rather than from the start of the academic year, and the result that follows is normally declared in November or December.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The tests the portal record lists, a first postgraduate degree, first year enrolment, an age below 30, full time mode and a recognised programme, are only half of what the guidelines actually apply. The other half sits on the undergraduate degree already earned and on the institution the student is now sitting in.

An applicant's undergraduate degree has to come from an institution recognised under Section 2(f) or Section 3 of the UGC Act, 1956, or authorised to award specified degrees under Section 22(1) of that Act, per the scheme guidelines. The postgraduate programme itself has to lead to a degree whose nomenclature and duration follow the UGC Notification on Specification of Degrees, 2014, as amended, which is what quietly excludes a long tail of locally named master's programmes. Where the student is in an integrated programme, the scholarship attaches to the PG component alone.

The age bar is measured at a fixed moment rather than on application day. The guidelines put it at below 30 years as on the date of admission in the first semester or year of the postgraduate programme, so a student who turns 30 during the course keeps the eligibility that admission fixed.

Then there is the institution test, which decides more claims than most applicants expect.

A practical consequence follows the table. The institution also needs a valid AISHE code to reach the National Scholarship Portal at all, and registers or re-registers on NSP through the district or state nodal officers. A student at an eligible college whose administration has never completed that registration has no route to apply, however strong the marks.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

An empty exclusions field on the record below is not the same as an open door. UGC's guidelines disqualify applicants clause by clause, and the clauses are specific.

Open, distance and correspondence mode is out, and so are private and part time modes; the scholarship reaches regular, full time admissions only. A student who already holds any postgraduate degree is out, whatever the subject, because the award is for a first PG degree. Age 30 or above on the date of first year admission is out. A programme in an institution that falls outside the four types above, or one that sits under Section 2(f) or Section 3 without valid NAAC accreditation, is out even where the student personally qualifies.

A student can also lose the award after filing, without ever failing an eligibility test. An incomplete form is summarily rejected, and no application counts for the award until the institution has verified it online, so a form left unverified when the window shuts is finished whatever its merit position would have been. A student already receiving another scholarship or fellowship may apply, but only if it is declared in the application, and on selection has to relinquish one of the two.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Renewal is an application, not an automatic continuation, and the scheme FAQ is blunt about the cost of forgetting it: the second year is not processed without a successful renewal submission on NSP. The renewal window normally opens alongside the fresh window, and institutions are expected to verify renewal applications in the same pass as new ones.

The academic condition is promotion. Clear the first year and the second follows; fail to be promoted to the next class or level and the award is forfeited outright, with good conduct and the prescribed attendance running underneath as standing conditions. Change is the other trigger. A change in course of study or in institution is not permitted, and where a student makes one the scholarship stands forfeited from the date of that change, which matters for anyone weighing a lateral move into a better department after first year results.

What you get

Award & benefits

Those 10,000 slots are not a single open pool. Government of India reservation policy governs the allocation and 30 per cent are reserved for women candidates. Each category is then halved by discipline: one half held for arts, humanities, social sciences, law and management, the other for science, engineering and technology, medical, technical, agriculture and forestry. The state nodal office in Maharashtra republishes the same national quota of 10,000 seats on its own page for the National Scholarship Scheme for Post Graduate Studies, which is a useful cross check when a college circular quotes something different.

Payment reaches the student directly. UGC disburses through Direct Benefit Transfer into the student's bank account, routed through PFMS, and Aadhaar is used as the identifier for release of the grant, so the account has to be Aadhaar linked and verified before money can move.

• Scholarships of Rs.15,000/- per month for 10 months in a year.

What to prepare

Documents required

The paperwork listed in the scheme record, mark sheets and certificates from class IX onwards, the admission letter, proof of identity, bank details and photographs, is collected in an unusual way for a portal scheme. Students are not required to upload any certificate or affidavit on NSP while submitting the online application. The documents go to the institution instead, which uses them to verify eligibility, may ask for further certificates and affidavits including the caste or category certificate issued by the competent authority, and then uploads a scanned copy of a prescribed certificate on the portal when it verifies the application.

The originals stay with the college. Its custody duty runs through the scholarship and for two years past the end of it, and inside that window UGC can demand any student's file without notice.

Bank details are the entry on that list worth double-checking before anything else. The account has to be KYC compliant and in the student's own name, and the guidelines warn that a selected student's payment may still fail to generate where the name, the account number or the IFSC code do not match. Once the institution has verified the application, no correspondence on the point is entertained.

Step by step

How to apply

No form on NSP opens until One Time Registration is behind the student. The portal's FAQ on One-Time Registration makes OTR mandatory for every NSP service, turns it into the login username, and issues it once for the whole of a student's academic career. Creating it needs an active mobile number, an Aadhaar number and a mobile number linked to that Aadhaar; the portal issues a reference number, and the student completes face authentication through the NSP OTR mobile app to convert it into an OTR number.

With an OTR in hand, the application itself runs in one annual pass. Applications are invited once a year on the portal, with a short notification also uploaded on the UGC website. The student files online, the institutional nodal officer verifies it against the documents submitted in college, and the district or state nodal officer verifies after that. No editing is possible once the closing date passes, and a wrong entry can stop payment later even if it clears verification now.

Students without a device or a stable connection have a counter route, and it is priced. Rs 30 including taxes is the ceiling the National Scholarship Portal puts on what a Common Service Centre can bill a candidate for doing the lot: the reference number, the biometric step, the OTR itself and the completed form. For a first year postgraduate meeting Aadhaar face authentication for the first time, that is the cheapest way to clear it on somebody else's hardware.

Application progress and money sit on different systems, and knowing which one to open saves a lot of guessing. Every application ID a student has ever filed is linked to the single OTR number, and all of those application statuses are visible from it, so the portal login is where application progress lives. Money is tracked somewhere else: once a scholarship is sanctioned, the disbursement runs through PFMS, and the payment itself is looked up on the PFMS Know Your Payment page rather than on NSP. Where PFMS shows a payment generated but the bank shows nothing, the first thing to check is whether the account is Aadhaar seeded at all.

How winners are picked

Selection process

All India merit decides the list, subject to a single carve out the guidelines write into it. The slots reserved for women are filled first by single, twin or fraternal girl child applicants without considering their marks in the undergraduate examination, and only the women's slots left over after that are filled on merit. An only daughter therefore does not need a competitive undergraduate percentage to reach this scheme, which is the surviving trace of the single girl child scholarship folded into it.

Undergraduate marks settle a tie at the lowest level of the merit list, and where the tied candidates still outnumber the declared slots after that pass, class XII marks settle what is left. That second tie break is the reason school mark sheets sit in the document list for a scholarship awarded on a postgraduate seat.

The result is declared normally in November or December of the same year by NSP. Candidates check it by logging into the portal with the user ID and password generated when the online application was filed, and the results are also uploaded on the UGC website under its notices.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

Only one benefit may be held at a time. A student who receives this scholarship declares that no other monetary benefit, scholarship or fellowship will be accepted from any other source, and must not hold any appointment, paid or otherwise, or draw emoluments, salary or stipend from another source during the tenure. Applying elsewhere is allowed without any no objection certificate from UGC, but selection elsewhere means resigning from the UGC scholarship.

The portal has added a rule around this for the current cycle. From the academic year 2026-27 the National Scholarship Portal allows a student one merit based scheme plus any number of welfare based ones, each subject to its own eligibility criteria. That is a filing rule at portal level, and it sits alongside rather than in place of the one benefit condition above, which is the stricter of the two the moment an award is actually made.

The penalties are stated in unusually plain terms. Furnishing wrong or misleading information invites action against the student and recovery of the full amount of the paid scholarship with interest. An institution whose verification results in payment to an ineligible student is held responsible, faces recovery from the institution or its officials, and can be blacklisted. Unauthorised access of the portal, bogus or multiple online applications and junk data invite action under the Information Technology Act.

Get help

Contact

Scheme questions belong to UGC itself, and the scheme page prints the Commission's switchboard, 011-23604446 and 011-23604200, with contact.ugc@nic.in for email.

Portal problems go elsewhere, and the split is by symptom rather than by scheme. The NSP helpdesk owns the login, the OTR and the application itself, at helpdesk@nsp.gov.in or 0120-6619540. PFMS owns the money once UGC has sanctioned it, on the toll free 1800 118 111. Neither answers before 8:00 AM, after 8:00 PM, or on a government holiday. Scheme wise nodal officer details are published under the public section of the portal, and a grievance can be registered there directly.

State nodal offices matter for verification chasing. Maharashtra, for instance, designated the Directorate of Technical Education as the state nodal office for this scheme from 2023-24, according to the Directorate of Technical Education, so a Maharashtra applicant whose verification is stuck above college level is chasing DTE rather than UGC.

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