PM-YASASVI: Post-Matric Scholarship for OBC, EBC and DNT Students(PM-YASASVI:PMSOBCEBCDNTS)

There is no single all-India deadline, and the myScheme record publishes none. Section 18 of the scheme guidelines sets a model calendar that States are asked to follow as far as possible, and section 13 asks every State to announce the scheme and invite applications from April each year, through newspaper advertisements and its portal, with a last date of its own.

The real calendar can run months behind the model. Punjab's window for 2024-25 Freeship Card applications closed on 15 February 2025, well into the academic year it covered (Akashvani News). Where your State applies through the National Scholarship Portal, the 2026-27 portal opened on 1 June 2026, and NSP publishes scheme-wise closing dates for student application, institute verification and State verification on its scheme list (National Scholarship Portal). Renewals are paid on the same timetable as fresh awards: the guidelines' one-instalment schedule covers both.

You qualify if you are an Indian national from an OBC, EBC or DNT community as notified for the State or Union Territory you are permanently settled in, you have passed Class 10 or a higher examination of a recognised board or university, and your parents' or guardians' income from all sources is within Rs 2.50 lakh a year. The ceiling counts your own earnings too if you are an employed student, and the income certificate is taken once, at admission, for a course that runs longer than a year, per the scheme guidelines. The community list that counts is the one notified in relation to your home State, not the State where your college is.

That domicile rule is the easiest one to get wrong. The State that pays is the one you belong to, not the one you study in: a Bihar-domiciled student in a Pune college applies to Bihar's authorities, and is treated for fee concessions as if studying in Bihar. Section 10 of the guidelines spells this out, and it is why the domicile certificate on the record's document list is not optional paperwork.

The course can be anything recognised from Class XI to a PhD, including correspondence and online courses at Central and State universities, but the institution has to qualify as well. It must fall in one of the nine categories the guidelines list, from institutions of national importance to NCVT-affiliated vocational institutes, and it must hold an AISHE or UDISE code, because the portal pulls the institution's affiliation, courses and approved seats from that database automatically. Higher-education institutions were also required to obtain NAAC or NBA accreditation before 2024 to continue in the scheme from 2025-26, according to the guidelines. Before you rely on the award, confirm your college's AISHE code exists; the National Scholarship Portal has a lookup for it.

The myScheme record below already carries the two-boys-per-family limit and the bar on holding a second scholarship, so only one point needs flagging: accepting any other scholarship or stipend stops this one from that date, while free lodging, a books grant or ad hoc help from any source may be taken alongside it.

Beyond the same-stage-second-degree rule in the record, the exclusions that actually bite are about the seat and the money, not the course. A seat filled through a management quota, NRI quota or spot admission without the State's merit criteria is not eligible, fees claimed against management-quota or spot-admission seats are not reimbursed, and a State may satisfy itself that you were admitted through an advertised, ranked and published merit process and that your course fee was fixed by a fee fixation committee before it releases anything, under Note 2 to the eligibility conditions in the scheme guidelines. A merit-list seat in a private college is fine; a discretionary one is not.

The scholarship also stops for the period of an MBBS internship or housemanship, or practical training in any other course, if you receive remuneration or a stipend during it.

If you have been selected under the separate Top Class College Education sub-scheme at one of its listed institutions, you are funded there instead; the Top Class College guidelines send the remaining OBC, EBC and DNT students admitted to those institutions to this post-matric scholarship, provided they are otherwise eligible.

Once awarded, the scholarship runs to the end of the course without a fresh application, provided you are promoted each year and your Aadhaar-based attendance reaches at least 75% in every academic year, per section 11 of the scheme guidelines. The portal design is explicit that renewals are automatic on promotion plus attendance, subject to the institution confirming that you rejoined the same course as a hosteller or day scholar, and that there should be no requirement for the student to apply for renewal. Aadhaar authentication is compulsory at renewal if it was not done at admission, and the income certificate is not taken again.

In practice the renewal depends on your institution having uploaded your attendance every month in the portal's attendance module, which the guidelines require until an automatic Aadhaar-based attendance system replaces it. A Freeship Card, once issued, stays valid for the whole course, so a renewing student never re-registers for one.

Failure is handled in two ways. In a Group 1 professional course a first failure still gets the award renewed; from the second failure you bear your own expenses until you are promoted, under section 11 of the guidelines. In any group, a student who fails and rejoins the same class as a regular student is paid for one additional year or the actual period, whichever is shorter, and a student promoted under university rules while still owing a paper from the lower class is paid for the higher class. The one hard line is drawn for students who move from a general degree into a professional or technical course: for them no later failure is condoned outside Group 1, and no further change of course is allowed, under condition viii. If you miss the annual examination through illness, a medical certificate accepted by the institution keeps the award alive.

The amount is fixed per year by the group your course falls in, for the full duration of the course:

Two groups of students get less than the table suggests. Correspondence and online students receive the tuition component only, with no academic allowance, and CA, ICWA, CS and ICFA students are treated as day scholars for the allowance. The guidelines ask States to pay fresh and renewal cases alike in one instalment as far as possible, and because the whole sum, the State's share and the Centre's together, is credited to your own account rather than to the college, the Freeship Card carries an undertaking that you will pay the institution's charges within 7 working days of the credit reaching your account, under section 8 of the guidelines.

There is no fixed number of awards. The guidelines call the scheme funds-limited: each State receives a notional allocation at the start of the financial year in proportion to its population, must use it to cover renewals first, and meets the rest of eligible demand from its own budget. Within the allocation, 30% of funds are earmarked for girls and 5% for students with disabilities, and every State must set aside at least 25% of its outlay for Group 4 courses, according to the scheme guidelines. In 2023-24 that machinery paid 27.97 lakh students, per the ministry's PIB briefing.

The record's list is the upload set; the guidelines' intent is that most of it is checked against databases rather than uploaded. Until the DigiLocker-style linkage they describe is in place, a fresh applicant scans and uploads a passport-size photograph, the certificate of every examination passed, a caste certificate signed by the authorised officer and a valid income certificate in the form the State prescribes, under section 8 of the scheme guidelines. The end state the guidelines describe has no uploads at all: board results, income, domicile and caste certificate databases and university records are to be matched through Aadhaar.

What each situation adds to the base list:

Aadhaar is the identity document for every scholarship scheme under the ministry's notification No. 428, and the portal is designed to run a demographic authentication in real time before it lets you register; the same guidelines ask you to give an alternative form of identity alongside it, as that notification provides. Payment is routed through the Aadhaar Payment Bridge after the number is checked against the NPCI mapper, so the account that gets paid is the one your Aadhaar is seeded to, not necessarily the one on your form. The National Scholarship Portal points students to NPCI's BASE platform to seed or de-seed Aadhaar themselves and to a status check for seeding.

Apply on your State's scholarship portal, or on the National Scholarship Portal where your State runs the scheme there. The myScheme record's own answer is "the specified online portal of the State/UT and National Scholarship Portal" (myScheme), and the ministry told Parliament in December 2024 that the pre- and post-matric OBC scholarships are implemented through States and Union Territories (PIB).

What that looks like differs by State. The National Scholarship Portal hosts a Himachal Pradesh copy of the post-matric guidelines among its State-scheme documents (NSP, HP State scheme). Punjab opened its Dr. Ambedkar Scholarship Portal to OBC, EBC and DNT students for the first time for 2024-25, in January 2025, with 15 February 2025 as the last date for Freeship Card applications (Akashvani News). Uttarakhand's Social Welfare Department tells students to apply through their own institution, after which the District Social Welfare Officer transfers the scholarship and fee to the student's bank account (Uttarakhand Social Welfare Department).

Whatever the portal, the sequence the guidelines design is the same, and the ministry's scheme page summarises it as registration well before college starts, a Freeship Card, then disbursement as the session begins:

1. Register for a Freeship Card on the portal before you take admission, giving your Aadhaar number, the course you intend to join and an undertaking to pay the institution within 7 working days of the scholarship reaching your account. Portals stay open all year for this step.
2. The State verifies income, caste and merit and issues a digitally signed card within 30 days of your request. You can download it from the portal; it is valid for one year from issue for the purpose of admission and, once you are admitted, for the whole course; and if you change your intended course before admission a fresh card is generated automatically.
3. Take admission on the strength of the card. An institution in the scheme is bound to admit you without pre-payment of tuition or hostel fee.
4. On the day of admission, apply for the scholarship itself on the portal and upload what your State asks for. The institution verifies on the portal, the same day, that you joined the course named on the card.
5. Where verification is still manual, the State must complete it within 30 days of the application, with presumed approval if it does not.
6. The credit arrives by DBT; you pay the college within the undertaking period.

Where your State uses the National Scholarship Portal, NSP's own mechanics sit on top: a One Time Registration number, 14 digits, generated once from Aadhaar or the enrolment ID and valid for your whole academic career, required for every application from 2024-25; the portal for 2026-27 opened on 1 June 2026; you may apply for one merit-based scheme and one or more welfare-based schemes in a year; and a Common Service Centre will do the OTR and the full application for a fixed charge of Rs 30, according to the National Scholarship Portal.

There is no merit list at the Centre. Section 10 of the scheme guidelines says every eligible OBC, EBC and DNT candidate is to be given the scholarship, subject to the eligibility conditions. What limits who is actually paid in a given year is money, and the guidelines are candid about it: the scheme is funds-limited, the Centre cannot meet the States' entire demand, and each State works within a notional allocation conveyed at the start of the financial year.

Inside that allocation the order is fixed. Renewal cases are covered first and only the balance goes to new awards; States are expected to lay down their own merit-cum-means criteria for both professional and non-professional courses to the extent of available funds; and where funds are short, disbursement goes first to students of government institutions, then government-aided ones, and only then to students of unaided private institutions. Whatever eligible demand remains is to be met by the State from its own budget, under sections 12 and 14 of the guidelines. Two students with identical eligibility can therefore be treated differently by their States, and a government-college student in a State that has exhausted its central share stands ahead of a private-college student in the same queue.

States are also told whom to go looking for. Every year in March and April they are to run a campaign to identify and enrol the poorest eligible households: OBC, EBC or DNT families with three or more deprivations under SECC-2011, families where one or both parents are illiterate, and students who passed Class 10 from a State, municipal or local-body school, with help in choosing employable courses, per section 6 of the guidelines.

The conditions in the record are the ones that cancel a scholarship; the ones here shape how the money arrives and who is answerable for it. The Centre bears 60 per cent of the cost and the State 40 per cent; for the North-Eastern States, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh the split is 90 per cent to 10 per cent; and Union Territories without a legislature are funded 100 per cent by the Centre, under section 15 of the scheme guidelines. A State may fund extra awards above its central share from its own plan, and those are generally not reimbursed.

Your institution carries obligations of its own. It must maintain Aadhaar-based attendance daily and upload it to the portal, file half-yearly self-audited reports to the State, and honour the Freeship Card by admitting you without pre-payment of tuition or hostel fee. States are to physically verify at least 10% of institutions and students each year, chosen at random, and to inspect every private institution offering graduation-level courses or above annually, according to the guidelines.

On your side, the cancellation clauses in the record are enforced through the portal itself: a student blacklisted for obtaining the award by a false statement is to be barred by the portal from applying under any scheme again. The guidelines close by reserving the Government of India's right to change the scheme's provisions at any time.

Neither the scheme guidelines nor the myScheme record publishes a helpline for this scholarship; help runs through the portal's grievance system and your State's welfare department. Section 21 of the guidelines requires every institution to name a Grievance Redressal Officer, lets you lodge a grievance through the portal or a mobile app, and escalates an unresolved grievance automatically to the district and then the State. Where the scheme runs on the National Scholarship Portal, the portal lists scheme-wise and district-wise nodal officers, a helpdesk and a grievance registration form. The nodal department is the Department of Social Justice and Empowerment, 8th Floor, GPOA-3, Netaji Nagar, New Delhi-110023, per its scheme page.