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

Overview

About PMYASASVI:PMSOBCEBCDNTS

Two lines in the rulebook settle most applications. This scholarship reaches children studying in government schools, and only in Class IX and Class X, so a child in an aided or unaided private school sits outside it whatever the family earns. What a qualifying child receives is one figure and nothing beside it: a consolidated academic allowance of Rs 4,000 a year, set out in the pre-matric guidelines the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment hosts on the National Scholarship Portal. Parents' or guardians' income from all sources has to stay under Rs 2,50,000 a year.

Small money, spread very wide. The ministry put Rs 193.83 crore behind the pre-matric scholarship in the financial year 2023-24 and counted 19.86 lakh students under it, in a briefing dated 23 October 2024. That release words the figure as an allocation for the year rather than a running total, and the two arms of PM-YASASVI are reported separately in it, so this number is the pre-matric one alone.

Sanction does not happen in Delhi. The award is made by the government of the state or union territory the applicant is domiciled in, on a bill the Centre and the state split 60:40, moving to 90:10 for the North Eastern states, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, with union territories that have no legislature carried by the Centre in full. The guidelines head that section funds-limited. A state has until the end of April to send in its proposal, and that proposal has to fit inside a notional allocation apportioned to it pro rata on population and conveyed at the opening of the financial year. Where a state does spend beyond its share, the text leaves one door ajar, allowing additional central assistance to be considered towards the end of a financial year if savings appear in the allocation.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

There is no national deadline, and myScheme publishes none for this scheme, which is accurate rather than a gap: each state government or UT administration announces the scheme itself, in leading-language newspapers, local dailies and on its own website or scholarship portal. For the states running it on the National Scholarship Portal, the 2026-27 windows look like this:

The spread across that table is the warning. One central scheme, one amount, and a closing date that falls months apart depending on which row a child belongs to; Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu even runs two rows, one for OBC students and a second for EBC students, on the same dates. Whatever any central calendar says, the state's own row is the date that binds.

One deadline sits well before any of these and explains a state that opens late. Every participating state prepares its annual action plan for the pre-matric scheme on or before 28 February of the preceding year, and the Centre's Project Appraisal Committee is meant to settle each state's outlay before 30 April. The model calendar in the same document expects registration to open on 1 April, close on 30 June and the money to reach the child before 30 September. The table above is what states are actually doing.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The government-school condition is written into the guidelines twice, once as the scope of the scheme and again as a condition of eligibility, and it is the line most applications die on. Nothing substitutes for it: not a low income, not a valid category certificate, not a recognised private school with good results.

The applicant is an Indian national, enrolled full time in Class IX or X, and holds a valid certificate for the OBC, EBC or DNT category, DNT being read here as covering children not already counted as SC, ST or OBC. Parents' or guardians' income from all sources must stay under the Rs 2,50,000 ceiling, and the income certificate is collected once, at the time of admission, rather than being demanded again each year. A child who is also offered another educational scholarship for Class IX or X keeps one of the two and tells the head of the school which one.

States are pushed to look past the income line for the children who need this most. The guidelines ask them to enrol the poorest households in mission mode and name two markers to search on: three or more deprivations under SECC-2011, and a household where one or both parents cannot read. Districts, blocks and villages with OBC, EBC or DNT majorities are to be worked first, with help from local bodies and municipal corporations.

A state can also add conditions of its own, and those bind. Karnataka's Backward Classes Welfare Department pays the same Rs 4,000 for Class 9 and 10 in government schools on the same Rs 2,50,000 income line, then requires permanent residence in the state, restricts the award to Backward Classes Category-1, 2A, 3A and 3B, admits only children who scored A+, A, B+ or B in the previous academic year, and insists that the caste and income certificates be updated against the student's SATS number, on its pre-matric scholarship page. No grade condition of that sort exists in the central text. Read your own state's page before assuming the central rules are the whole test.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

Nothing at all appears under exclusions on this scheme's public record, which can leave a family thinking there are none. The disqualifiers are real; they are simply scattered through the guidelines' conditions of award rather than gathered in one list:

• Private schools, aided or unaided alike, because the award follows the school and not the child's category.
• A child already drawing benefits under some other pre-matric scholarship scheme.
• A third son of the same parents or guardians. Two boys of one family is the ceiling, and girls of that family count against nothing.
• A repeated class, for the second year spent in it.
• Attendance in the year before the award that fell short of the 75 per cent the guidelines treat as a prerequisite.
• A false statement carries a permanent bar rather than a warning. The scholarship is cancelled, the state may claim back what it paid, and the child is debarred for life from every scheme.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Renewal happens without the child touching the portal again. A child who has been promoted, has the attendance and has rejoined the school is carried forward on the institution's confirmation alone, and the guidelines go further than merely permitting that: they instruct that the portal must not require the student to apply again.

The standing conditions are satisfactory academic performance and 75 per cent attendance in every academic year, and on those terms the award runs until the child passes Class X. Attendance is meant to be verified by an Aadhaar-based system; until the Centre finalises one, the school uploads it month by month into the portal's attendance module. Where Aadhaar was never authenticated at admission, this is the point at which it becomes compulsory.

Repeating a year breaks the payment chain. The award attaches to a class rather than to a child, and it can be drawn against that class once, so a second run at Class IX earns nothing. Illness is handled separately: a scholar who could not sit the annual examination may still be renewed on a medical certificate from a prescribed authority, accepted by the school.

What you get

Award & benefits

Rs 4,000 a year, consolidated, is the whole benefit. There is no maintenance allowance, no fee reimbursement and no book or stationery head, and the text draws no line at all between a day scholar and a hosteller, so a Class IX child living at home and one living in a hostel are paid the identical single sum.

One head is named without being priced. The payment clause speaks of the academic allowance and the disability allowance, if any, reaching the account together, yet nowhere in the pre-matric section is a rate fixed for a disability allowance, so a family with a disability certificate should ask the state what, if anything, it pays on that head rather than assume a figure.

Payment runs on Aadhaar rather than on a bank form. The entire sum, central share and state share together, is credited to the student's or a parent's account by direct benefit transfer, preferably through the Aadhaar Payment Bridge, and the guidelines forbid the portal from calling for bank details and separately authenticating them: the Aadhaar number is checked against the NPCI mapper and the money follows whichever account it is seeded to. An unseeded account is the commonest reason a sanctioned amount never lands, and NPCI's Bharat Aadhaar Seeding Enabler platform is the self-service way to correct it.

For scale inside the same umbrella: the ministry told the Lok Sabha on 17 December 2024 that its Top Class Education in School sub-scheme pays a maximum of Rs 75,000 a year for a student of Class 9 and 10, and Rs 1,25,000 a year for Class 11 and 12, covering tuition, hostel fee and other charges the school levies. That is a selective award for a small, merit-picked group. The pre-matric allowance is the broad one, and it is not a fee waiver.

• Coverage Value of Scholarship: The students shall be given a consolidated academic allowance of ₹4,000/- per annum.
• Note: The entire scholarship amount both from the State and Central Government will be paid directly into the account of the students or parents ONLY through DBT preferably through an Aadhaar Based Payment System (Aadhaar Payment Bridge-AePS).

What to prepare

Documents required

The record lists certificates; the guidelines change what a family is supposed to do with them. There is to be no upload of any document or certificate into the system at all. Income, domicile and caste certificate databases are to be linked and auto-verified through DigiLocker or an equivalent mechanism, with the Aadhaar number as the key that joins them.

So the preparation is administrative rather than clerical. Have the caste or community certificate and the income certificate issued by the competent authority, in the same name and spelling the Aadhaar carries, before the state's window opens. Get the bank account Aadhaar-seeded. A disability certificate belongs in the same pile where the child has one.

One safeguard is worth knowing about in advance. The 2017 notification that made Aadhaar compulsory for these scholarships arrived with a stipulation the guidelines repeat in full: where Aadhaar authentication fails for any reason at all, the applicant has to be permitted to establish identity by some other means, so that a genuine claimant is not shut out by a failed match.

Step by step

How to apply

Every application is filed online, and the guidelines rule out paper applications expressly. Since the 2024-25 academic year the National Scholarship Portal has required a One Time Registration number first, a 14-digit number generated from the student's Aadhaar or Aadhaar enrolment ID and good for the child's entire academic career, which is why nobody re-registers each year. Where there is no device at home, a Common Service Centre will run the registration and the application end to end for a capped charge of Rs 30, taxes included.

Which portal to use is where searchers go wrong, and the answer is not the one the scheme's name suggests. On NSP's scheme list for 2026-27 the Central Sector tab carries exactly two PM-YASASVI entries, both of them Top Class Education schemes, one for schools and one for colleges. The pre-matric award is absent from that tab because it is not a central sector scheme. It sits behind the Centrally Sponsored Schemes tab instead, and not as one national entry: it appears as a separate row per participating state or union territory, named for that state and carrying its own opening and closing dates.

A state missing from those rows is not necessarily out of the scheme. The guidelines let any state whose own portal meets the prescribed parameters keep it, provided it feeds data to the central portal in real time, and myScheme's own answer names both routes, the specified online portal of the state or union territory and the National Scholarship Portal (myScheme). So look for your state's row on NSP first; if it is not there, the state's own scholarship portal is where the form lives.

Inside the school the timing is deliberately tight. An admitted student is expected to file on the portal that very day, and the school is expected to record on the portal, before the day is out, that the child has actually joined it. Where verification is still being done by hand rather than by database, the guidelines cap it at 30 days from the application, after which approval is presumed.

Tracking the Application and the Payment

Two systems answer two different questions, and families lose weeks by putting the question to the wrong one.

• The stage the file is at. The Application Status service on the National Scholarship Portal shows the stage an application is sitting at. One of those stages is the defective application, a form sent back for correction, and every scheme on the portal publishes a closing date for that correction alongside its application deadline; miss it and the correction cannot be made at all.
• The payment itself. Once the scholarship is sanctioned, the payment is traced on the Public Financial Management System, whose Know Your Payment page carries a Track NSP Payments option and a lookup by bank and account number.

How winners are picked

Selection process

No child is ranked against another for this allowance. The guidelines hand the detailed procedure for selecting students to state governments and UT administrations, subject only to it not contradicting the central text, so what decides an application is the eligibility conditions plus whatever identification drive the state is running that year.

Two floors constrain that discretion: at least 5 per cent of the scholarships are to reach students with disabilities, and 30 per cent of the beneficiaries are to be reserved for girls. Beyond that, states are asked to publicise the scheme through gram panchayat notice boards, school committees and parent-teacher meetings, which is the guidelines' answer to an award whose intended beneficiaries frequently do not know it exists.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

A student who breaches school discipline, or any other term of the scholarship, can have it suspended or cancelled on the competent school authority's satisfaction, and the state government or UT administration can cancel the award directly where it is satisfied the scheme's regulations were violated.

Changing school mid-year is restricted too. Migration from one institution to another is not normally allowed during an academic year, the exception being exceptional circumstances that genuinely serve the student's academic career.

Against those obligations the government sets a few of its own. Administrative, monitoring and evaluation cost is capped at 1 per cent of the annual scheme cost, and that cap is what pays for the portal, the social audits and the publicity. The scheme is subject to a social audit once a year, an annual third-party evaluation, and half-yearly self-audited reports from every institution. Nothing in the document is permanent, either: its final clause leaves every provision changeable at the Government of India's discretion.

Get help

Contact

This scheme publishes no number a parent can ring. The first stop is the school, through the Grievance Redressal Officer every institution has to appoint, because verification and attendance both originate there, and a complaint left unresolved climbs by itself to the district and then the state. The Department of Social Justice and Empowerment prints a departmental toll-free line, 18002021989, at the head of every page on its site, the PM-YASASVI scheme page included; it answers for the department that owns the scheme rather than for this scholarship on its own. Problems with the portal or the payment go to NSP's own helpdesk and its online grievance registration.

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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