PM-YASASVI: Top Class School Education for OBC, EBC and DNT Students(PM-YASASVI:TCSEOBCEBCDNTS)

Overview

About PM-YASASVI:TCSEOBCEBCDNTS

A family reading about this scheme in the 2026-27 cycle needs one fact ahead of every other. The National Scholarship Portal has the Top Class School component listed for renewal applications only, with no fresh window at all, so a child who is not already drawing the award cannot join it this year however the marks fall (Schemes on NSP).

What the award does in an open year explains why the queue is worth joining. For FY 2024-25 the Department of Social Justice and Empowerment records Rs 33.52 crore released under Top Class School Education and 12,813 students covered, in its year-end review of 29 December 2025; the ministry's earlier briefing of 23 October 2024 put the same component at Rs 6.55 crore allocated for 2,602 students in 2023-24. The headcount multiplied inside a single year and this is still the narrowest school award the ministry runs, because the shortlist of schools is drawn up long before any child is considered, and because each state is ranking its own applicants against a slot count fixed in advance.

This is component (C) of the PM-YASASVI umbrella, the Central Sector Scheme of Top Class Education in Schools for OBC, EBC and DNT students, and it funds a child from Class 9 through to the end of Class 12 (PM-YASASVI guidelines). The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment carries the whole cost and works through the state governments and the National Scholarship Portal to deliver it. The portal republishes the same section as this scheme's own specification document (Schemes on NSP).

What makes a school a Top Class School is one blunt test. A committee chaired by the Joint Secretary (Backward Classes), with people from the Department of School Education and NITI Aayog on it, shortlists schools that have consistently secured a 100 per cent pass rate in the Class 10 and Class 12 examinations (PM-YASASVI guidelines). Ownership does not come into it: a shortlisted school may be run by the Centre, a state, a local body, or be an aided or a private school. Nothing in the scheme moves a student into one of those schools, which is why the eligibility test below starts with where the child is already enrolled.

How many awards a state gets is decided before any application is filed, and it is decided demographically rather than academically. Slots are allocated to each state on the OBC population data available, then broken down class by class and announced each April. The allocation the ministry published for 2022-23 shows how uneven that arithmetic is.

Four entries in that table are zeros: Mizoram, Nagaland, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and Lakshadweep were allotted nothing at all, and Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh were allotted single figures. A student in one of those places is not excluded by any rule about who they are. The population formula simply left their state without a share that year.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

Two calendars govern this scheme and they belong to different bodies. The guidelines fix the annual announcement of slots, state by state and class by class, to the month of April. The National Scholarship Portal then publishes the application window, and for 2026-27 every date it carries for this component is a renewal date.

Those dates run a month ahead of the college component's, which closes student applications on 31-10-2026 on the same portal. Anyone holding both schemes in mind will miss this one first.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Three conditions decide it, and the second is where most searches end. The child belongs to the OBC, EBC or DNT category, is already studying in a school identified as a Top Class School under this scheme, and comes from a household with an annual income of less than Rs 2.5 lakh (PM-YASASVI guidelines).

Read that income wording closely, because the sister scheme reads differently. The school component sets the bar at a household income of less than Rs 2.5 lakh (PM-YASASVI guidelines). Its college counterpart admits students whose total annual family income from all sources is up to Rs 2.50 lakh (Top Class College guidelines). A household sitting exactly on the figure is inside one scheme and outside the other, on the words each document actually uses.

Two practical conditions sit alongside the three. The student must hold a bank account and give its details on the application, since nothing under this component is routed through the school. And the school itself has to carry an Aadhaar-based attendance system capable of being integrated into a central portal if the ministry asks for it, which is a condition on the institution that a family cannot fix on its own.

Girls have a floor rather than a separate scheme. At least 30 per cent of the scholarships under this component are reserved for them, and the ranked lists that decide the rest are drawn for boys and girls separately, so the two groups are never competing against each other for the same place.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

Nothing in this component's paperwork is set out under the heading of exclusions. Two bars still operate, one written into the scheme itself and one imposed by the portal that hosts it.

Assistance stops where it would duplicate. A student in a school assisted under this scheme is not eligible for help from any other government scheme for the items or purposes this one already covers, which for a Class 11 boarder means tuition, hostel and the school's other charges are spoken for (PM-YASASVI guidelines). The portal adds a second limit that is not in the guidelines at all: this component is listed as a merit based scheme, and from AY 2026-27 a student may hold one merit based scholarship and one or more welfare based ones (National Scholarship Portal).

Everything else that rules a child out is structural. A school outside the shortlist, a household income at or above the ceiling, a class below 9 or above 12: none of these can be argued around, because none of them is a discretion anybody at the school or the state exercises.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

The guidelines for this component do not set out a renewal clause, a promotion test or a minimum attendance figure, which is unusual for a four-year award and is worth knowing before you plan around it. What the portal does instead is treat renewal as its own track with its own calendar. For 2026-27 the scheme's listing on the National Scholarship Portal carries renewal dates only, and no fresh application window at all (Schemes on NSP).

The practical shape of that is straightforward. A child selected in Class 9 is carried to the end of Class 12, with the ceiling stepping up when they enter Class 11, and each year's continuation is filed on the portal in the renewal window and verified by the school. A family whose child is not already inside the scheme has no way in during a renewal-only year, however well the child has done.

What you get

Award & benefits

The grant is a reimbursement ceiling against what the school actually charges, not a flat allowance paid regardless of the bill. It covers tuition fee, hostel fee and the other charges the school requires, up to the limits below.

Where the money lands is the detail that separates this component from its college counterpart. The guidelines provide for one release only, made directly into the account of the beneficiary through Direct Benefit Transfer, and name no payment to the school anywhere (PM-YASASVI guidelines). A family therefore holds the fee money and settles the school's bill itself.

The timing is fixed rather than rolling, and the two official descriptions of it do not read alike. The guidelines put the payment in one instalment, to be released before 15 August each year (PM-YASASVI guidelines). The scheme's entry on myScheme, the government's citizen-facing scheme finder, writes the same clause in the plural, as payment in instalments before that date. Take the date as the settled part and the number of transfers as the part that varies, and plan the school's own fee deadline around it, because nothing here arrives on the school's schedule.

• The grants will be provided for tuition fee, hostel fee, and other charges as required by the school, subject to a maximum of ₹75,000/- per annum per student of Class 9 and 10 and ₹1,25,000/- per annum per student of Class 11 and 12.
• Note 01: The release of funds will be directly into the account of beneficiaries through DBT mode.
• Note 02: Payment shall be made in installments to be released before 15th August each year.

What to prepare

Documents required

One paper in the upload set does more work than all the others put together. Merit under this component is read off the marks obtained in the final examination of the previous class, so it is the previous year's marksheet that decides the outcome; the certificates, the Aadhaar card and the bank details establish only that the child is entitled to be ranked at all.

Verification runs in two stages and neither of them is the ministry. Applications are verified online by the nodal officers of the school, and then confirmed online by the state government (PM-YASASVI guidelines). A file that stalls has almost always stalled at one of those two desks, which is where to ask.

Step by step

How to apply

Students already studying in a Top Class School apply themselves on the National Scholarship Portal, entering the marks they obtained in the final examination of the previous class along with the rest of the form. There is no school-level nomination step before that and no separate scheme portal to register on.

The portal's own mechanics apply on top. On its scheme list this component sits under the Backward Classes wing of the Department of Social Justice and Empowerment, a heading that carries exactly two entries, this one and its college counterpart (Schemes on NSP). Nothing can be filed without a One Time Registration number, which the NSP OTR app issues against Aadhaar. What a Common Service Centre may charge a family for doing the whole of that on its behalf is fixed by the portal rather than by the operator: Rs 30 per candidate, taxes included, from the reference number through to the submitted form (National Scholarship Portal).

Tracking splits into two lookups because two different things can go wrong. Application Status, under the student login, shows how far the file has travelled and whether the school's nodal officer and the state have signed off. Track Your Payment answers the other question, and the portal hands that one to the Public Financial Management System, which reports against your bank account number (Know Your Payment, PFMS). With this component the money reaches the family rather than the school, so the payment lookup, and not the application status, is what tells a parent whether the term's fee is actually covered.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Nobody at the school picks the recipients. Once the applications are verified, a state-wise merit list is prepared for each class, separately for boys and for girls, on the basis of the marks obtained in the final examination of the previous class, and the guidelines say the allocation of scholarships is then done automatically on that merit (PM-YASASVI guidelines). The list is drawn inside your state, against your state's slot count for your class, so the same marksheet can win a place in one state and miss in another.

An entrance test ran in the scheme's early years and still fills the search results, which is worth getting right in both directions: nobody should sit down to prepare for a paper that is not being set, and nobody should miss one that is. The ministry commissioned the National Testing Agency to hold a YASASVI Entrance Test for candidates in Class 9 and Class 11 at the shortlisted schools, and Gujarat's Director of Developing Castes Welfare carried that route to families in 2022 (Gujarat Social Justice and Empowerment Department press note). The ministry then reopened registration and moved the paper to 25 September 2022 (Extension of date of registration of YASASVI Entrance Test 2022).

What came after is not perfectly tidy, so here is the whole of it. The ministry's October 2024 briefing names the YASASVI Entrance Test 2023, conducted by the National Testing Agency, as the basis of candidate selection (PIB), and that is a paper already sat rather than one being announced. On the other side, the specification the portal publishes for this scheme names no entrance test at any point and puts merit on the previous class's marks (scheme specification, National Scholarship Portal), and the department's own PM-YASASVI page still links the notice extending the YASASVI Entrance Test 2022 and nothing about a test since (Department of Social Justice and Empowerment). Read together, the rule a renewal is judged on today is the marks rule above; anyone selling preparation for a new YASASVI paper should be asked to point at the department's own notice for it first.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The obligations that follow an award fall mainly on the school and on the monitoring machinery, not on the family. The shortlisted school has to run the Aadhaar-based attendance system described above, and the designated portal is built to let students update information on the given performance criteria at regular intervals (PM-YASASVI guidelines).

Above that sits a real-time management information system, linked by API to the government's Output Outcome Monitoring Framework dashboard, and one clause with teeth for the beneficiary. Students may be contacted by phone or by personal visit to gauge the scheme's impact, and the guidelines state plainly that such contact may inform a decision on whether or not to continue the grant, at any time. Implementation follows the General Financial Rules, 2017, and the eligibility conditions, the selection procedure and the extent of support may all be modified with the approval of the Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment.

Get help

Contact

The school's nodal officer is the first door to knock on, and usually the only one that needs knocking. That officer performs the online verification, and so is the only person who can say whether an application went through, moved on to the state, or is still waiting in the queue.

One level above sits the department's PM-YASASVI umbrella page, which carries two numbers worth keeping: the toll free 18002021989 and the national helpline on 14566 (Department of Social Justice and Empowerment). Problems with the portal rather than with the scheme go to the National Scholarship Portal's own channels, which publish scheme-wise and district-wise nodal officer lists and a grievance registration facility (National Scholarship Portal, 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.

Explore more

Related scholarships

References

Sources