Persons With Disabilities Scheme In Colleges: Higher Education For Persons With Special Needs(Hepsn)

Overview

About Hepsn

The myScheme listing for the Persons with Disabilities Scheme in Colleges records the beneficiary as an individual. The guideline document behind that listing never addresses one. Every condition in it is written to a college principal, the sanctioned amount lands in a college bank account, and no disabled student's name appears on the application at any stage. Recognising that early turns a fruitless hunt for a form into a much better question: what should already exist on my campus because of it, and who can I hold to that.

The paperwork this listing points at is titled Guidelines for Persons with Disabilities Scheme in Colleges, XII Plan, and it covers the years 2012 to 2017 under the University Grants Commission. It holds two distinct schemes between its covers. The first is Higher Education for Persons with Special Needs, shortened everywhere to HEPSN, which assists colleges. The second is Financial Assistance to Visually Challenged Teachers, which reimburses a blind permanent teacher for a Reader and for Braille or recorded material, and reaches no student at all. Source: the UGC guidelines for the Persons with Disabilities Scheme in Colleges.

Ownership of the scheme is recorded one way on the listing and another way on the booklet the listing links to. The myScheme record files it under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment and its Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, and marks the beneficiary type Individual. The booklet carries the University Grants Commission's imprint on its cover, the UGC answers to the Ministry of Education, and its operative sentences address a college seeking a grant. Where those two accounts pull apart, a sanction follows the booklet.

The population this is meant to serve is not small. The All India Survey on Higher Education for 2021-22 counted 88,748 students with disabilities enrolled in Indian higher education, of whom 51,373 were male and 37,375 female, per the Ministry of Education's AISHE 2021-22 report. What HEPSN was designed to change for them is the campus, not their bank balance: a unit that helps with admission and counselling, a building with ramps and usable toilets, and equipment such as screen reading software that the college owns and lends.

That design has since been overtaken. The UGC's own Accessibility Guidelines and Standards for Higher Education Institutions and Universities, brought out in June 2022, describes the activities and facilities that were part of HEPSN and the Equal Opportunity Cell in the past tense, and says that with the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 the duties of a higher education institution now run well beyond them. An institution is expected to strengthen whatever cell or enabling unit it already has, and a person with a disability should preferably be its coordinator.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

Neither an opening date nor a closing date is published on the myScheme record, and the guidelines announce no annual window either. What the document does fix is a horizon: it is a XII Plan document covering 2012 to 2017, each capital ceiling is expressed as a one-time amount for the Plan period, and the teachers' component states in terms that the scheme will end with the Plan period, per the UGC guidelines.

Read that alongside the UGC's June 2022 accessibility guidelines, which speak of HEPSN in the past tense, and the honest position is that no live call for HEPSN proposals is visible in anything the UGC currently publishes. A college prospectus or a college webpage still advertising an HEPSN cell is describing a unit set up under the old scheme, which is a different claim from money being available now.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Three conditions decide whether a college can be assisted, and a student passes none of them because none is about a student. The institution has to already have disabled persons enrolled across its courses, including visual impairment, hearing impairment and locomotor disability. It has to hold UGC recognition under sections 2(f) and 12 B. And it has to have constituted an expert committee that includes faculty, outside experts and differently-abled persons themselves, meeting at least once a year to review the scheme's activities, per the UGC guidelines.

Of those three, the recognition condition is the one anybody can check from outside the college. The UGC publishes its own roll of colleges under section 2(f) and 12(B) of the UGC Act, and a college that does not appear on it was never in a position to draw this grant, whatever its prospectus says about disability support.

One vintage warning belongs here. The eligibility clause defines disability by the Persons with Disabilities Act 1995, the statute the guidelines were written under. That Act was replaced by the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, which recognises a wider set of conditions and uses the benchmark disability test, so a disability recognised today may not appear in the definition the old clause points to.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

The booklet prints no disqualification clause and myScheme reproduces that blank, so the exclusions have to be read backwards out of the three conditions. A college with no disabled students on its rolls, a college outside sections 2(f) and 12 B, or a college that never constituted the expert committee falls outside the scheme however strong its case otherwise is.

Worth separating from HEPSN entirely: the teachers' component in the same booklet is confined to visually challenged permanent teachers of colleges covered under sections 2(f) and 12B, and a student cannot claim under it in any circumstances.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Two of the three components are structurally incapable of renewal. The access grant and the equipment grant are each described as a one-time grant per college for the Plan period, so a college that has drawn either has drawn it, and the guidelines offer no second sanction.

Only the enabling unit component recurs. Its annual provision is released for the first year once the proposal is approved, and every later release is conditional on an audited utilisation certificate and a statement of expenditure for the money already spent. Continuation is therefore a function of accounting, not of reapplying. Source: the UGC guidelines.

What you get

Award & benefits

Every figure below is an XII Plan rate, written for the years 2012 to 2017, and the document carries no later revision.

The enabling unit is the component a disabled student meets face to face. Its listed jobs are to smooth admission into courses, to give guidance and counselling, to gather the standing orders on fee concessions, examination procedure and reservation, to assess what assistive devices the enrolled students actually need, to run awareness sessions for teachers on how to teach and evaluate them, to keep the devices bought under the scheme maintained, and to help graduates into employment. A faculty coordinator nominated by the head of the institution runs it.

• Provision of Facilities and Financial assistance
• The HEPSN scheme has three components. They are enumerated as follows: Component 1: Establishment of Enabling Units for differently-abled Persons
• To develop awareness in the higher education system and also to provide necessary guidance and counseling to differently-abled persons, it is proposed to establish resource units in colleges in the country, which will be called Enabling Units. The functions of this Enabling Unit will be to:
• Facilitate admission of differently-abled persons in various courses;
• Provide guidance and counseling to differently-abled individuals;
• Create awareness about the needs of differently-abled persons, and other general issues concerning their learning; and
• Assist differently-abled graduates to gain successful employment in the public as well as private sectors.
• The special unit will be coordinated by a faculty member to be nominated by the head of the institution. He/she will work as an honorary coordinator for which a token honorarium of Rs. 4000/- per month will be paid. The unit will also have a budgetary provision of ₹ 50,000/per year towards general administration, stationery, and contingencies, and to avail the services of experts and personnel for organizing awareness programs, counseling sessions, etc., for efficient and independent functioning in order to achieve its objectives.
• Component 2: Providing Access to Differently-abled Persons
• The UGC will make a one-time grant of up to ₹ 5,00,000 per college during the Plan period so that the colleges can address the accessibility issues pertaining to disability and make special arrangements in the environment for their mobility and independent functioning.
• The colleges address accessibility-related issues as per the stipulations of the Persons with Disabilities Act 1995.
• The colleges ensure that all existing structures as well as future construction projects in their campuses are made disabled-friendly.
• The institutes create special facilities such as ramps, rails, and special toilets, and make other necessary changes to suit the special needs of differently-abled persons.
• Component 3: Providing Special Equipment to Augment Educational Services for Differently-abled Persons
• Differently-abled persons require special aids and appliances for their daily functioning. These aids are available through various schemes of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment. In addition to the procurement of assistive devices through these schemes, higher education institutions may also need special learning and assessment devices to help differently-abled students enrolled in higher education. In addition, visually challenged students need Readers. Availability of devices such as computers with screen reading software, low-vision aids, scanners, mobility devices, etc., in the institutes, would enrich the educational experiences of differently-abled persons. Therefore, colleges are encouraged to procure such devices and provide the facility of Readers for visually challenged students. The UGC will provide an ad hoc one-time grant of up to ₹1,50,000 per college during the Twelfth Plan period

What to prepare

Documents required

The application proforma is an institutional form and reads like one. It asks for the college's name and address, its year of establishment, whether it comes under sections 2(f) and 12(B), whether it sits in an SC, ST or Minority concentrated district, the services it currently offers disabled persons, how many disabled persons are enrolled, which component or components it is seeking, how it will implement the scheme, whether the proposal has been forwarded through the University, a brief history, the list of managing committee members and the annual expenditure of the course. A bank block follows, covering the account holder's contact details, bank and branch, whether the branch is computerised and RTGS or NEFT enabled, the IFSC and MICR codes and the account number. The principal signs it with the college seal. Source: the UGC guidelines.

The myScheme record prints a wholly different checklist under the same scheme name, and every item on it belongs to a student rather than to a college: a disability certificate, a bonafide certificate, a marksheet, an account in the student's own name. The UGC proforma has no field for any of them. A disability certificate is a real document that unlocks real things elsewhere, but this particular form gives it nowhere to go.

Step by step

How to apply

A college applies on the prescribed proforma, and the guidelines require the application for specific projects to travel along with the College Development proposal rather than on its own. Question nine of that proforma asks whether the proposal has been forwarded through the University, which is how the form tells a principal what route the file was expected to have taken before it reached the UGC. The teachers' component moves on a different track: that proposal goes to the UGC's regional office along with the college's Twelfth Plan proposal and a consolidated list of every visually challenged teacher on the staff. Source: the UGC guidelines.

Release then runs component by component. The enabling unit's yearly provision is released for the first year after the proposal is approved, and subsequent grants only against an audited utilisation certificate and statement of expenditure. The access grant is released on receipt of detailed plans and estimates prepared to UGC building guidelines. The equipment grant is released as 90% first, with the balance 10% paid on a reimbursement basis once the audited statement of expenditure and utilisation certificate come in, per the UGC guidelines.

Tracking one of these means chasing documents, because the booklet sets up no portal to refresh and describes no online status lookup. The two things a college can point at are the UGC's sanction letter and the instalments released against it. The utilisation certificate printed at the back of the same booklet leaves blanks for the sanction letter number and its date, so that number becomes the reference every later query has to quote. Before the letter arrives, the only office that knows where the file is sitting is the university that forwarded it.

How winners are picked

Selection process

The guidelines set out qualifying conditions and a release procedure, and stop short of any comparative rule. There is no marking scheme, no ranked list of colleges and no stated quota per state or per university, so a proposal is assessed on whether the conditions are met and whether the project stands up rather than against rival proposals.

Component two carries the closest thing to a technical scrutiny: the money moves only once detailed plans and estimates conforming to UGC building guidelines have been received, and the construction plans have to address accessibility explicitly, with the guidance issued by the office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities to be followed. For the teachers' component the booklet says the UGC analyses and approves the proposal at its own level. Source: the UGC guidelines.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The conditions attach to the college for as long as it holds the grant. The expert committee has to meet at least once a year. The enabling unit has to prepare annual reports carrying case histories of the differently-abled persons it has helped, and a UGC expert team may evaluate how it is functioning. Devices bought under the equipment component have to be maintained and students encouraged to use them. Source: the UGC guidelines.

The financial conditions are stricter than the amounts suggest. Three signatures close the utilisation certificate: the Registrar or Principal, a Finance Officer, and a Chartered Accountant or Government Auditor. Above them the college has to declare whatever interest the UGC money earned while it sat in the account. What that certificate does not do is close the file. Its final undertaking leaves the sum permanently reclaimable: an objection raised long afterwards can still oblige the college to pay the amount back or have it regularised.

Get help

Contact

Two offices stand between a college and this grant before any national helpline becomes relevant. Because the proposal is forwarded through the affiliating university, a principal starts at that university's college development office; the teachers' component instead goes to whichever UGC regional office covers the state. Behind both sits the Commission's head office, which is where the sanction letter and the number a college must later quote back both originate, and where an unanswered question about either ends up: Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, New Delhi 110002, with contact.ugc@nic.in and the office lines 011-23604446 and 011-23604200 printed on the UGC website.

None of those numbers will help a student who is asking about money, because the UGC is not the payer here. The scholarships that are paid to a disabled student directly belong to the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, and applications for them are called for through the National Scholarship Portal, per the DEPwD scheme guidelines.

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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