Post Matric Scholarship Students With Disabilities(POST-DIS)

Overview

About POST-DIS

The Post-Matric Scholarship for Students with Disabilities is the component of the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities' umbrella scholarship scheme that picks a student up at Class XI and stays with them to a post-graduate degree or diploma. It sits under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, it is filed only on the National Scholarship Portal, and the guidelines that govern it were rewritten. The version DEPwD issued on 25 September 2024 pays a hosteller Rs 1,200 a month and a day scholar Rs 650 a month, and reimburses admission and tuition fee up to Rs 1.40 lakh a year, per the Central Sector Umbrella Scheme guidelines.

That matters because most pages describing this scheme still carry the arrangement it replaced. The earlier text set maintenance by course group, with a medicine or engineering hosteller on one rate and a Class XI student on another, and capped compulsory non-refundable fees at Rs 1.50 lakh a year. DEPwD's own comparison of the previous and current text shows both of those blocks struck out and replaced by the single pair of maintenance rates and the split between a Rs 1.40 lakh fee head and a separate Rs 10,000 miscellaneous fee head (Revision of the existing guidelines, 20 September 2024).

The scheme is also rationed, which the amount tables never show. It carries 17,000 slots a year, renewal cases included, and fresh applications are considered only against whatever is left once every renewal has been processed (scheme guidelines). Against that ceiling, the post-matric component actually paid 11,668 students Rs 37.29 crore in 2024-25, and 151,751 students Rs 462.01 crore across the ten years to that date, on the Department's own scheme-wise release statement (DEPwD, amount released and beneficiaries).

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

Most schemes on the portal opened for academic year 2026-27 on 1 June 2026. This one was switched on later, on 25 July 2026 (Schemes on NSP).

Two of those dates are worth separating. The 31 October cut-off is the only one a student controls, and registration closes at midnight on it unless the Department extends the date; the 15 November window belongs to a defective application that has already been filed and sent back for correction (DEPwD portal FAQ). The dates themselves are not set by DEPwD but by the DBT Mission in the Cabinet Secretariat, which is why they can move without the scheme changing. The Department's pre-matric component closed a month earlier this year, on 30 September 2026, so a family with a child in Class X and another in Class XII is working to two different deadlines (Schemes on NSP).

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

You need Indian nationality, a benchmark disability of 40 per cent or more as defined in the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016, and parental or guardian income from all sources of not more than Rs 2.50 lakh a year (scheme guidelines). One general condition was re-worded on 4 September 2025, and the consolidated guidelines a student downloads still print the superseded version of it. The document test is now possession of a UDID card and an Aadhaar card; the earlier condition, which turned on a disability certificate from the competent authority and also accepted UDID enrolment, was struck out (DEPwD office memorandum).

The course rules are where applications quietly fail. A student who has already passed one stage of education and enrols in the same stage in a different subject, a B.Com after a B.A., is not eligible; a student taking L.L.B, B.Ed or B.El.Ed after a B.A., B.Sc or B.E. is. Two courses running at the same time earn a scholarship on one of them only. A student who failed or passed an undergraduate examination in arts, science or commerce and then joined a recognised professional or technical certificate, diploma or degree course is covered (scheme guidelines).

Correspondence study counts here, and that is unusual. Of the Department's three portal-based scholarships, distance and continuing education is admissible under the post-matric component alone (DEPwD frequently asked questions for the National Scholarship Portal). Working students are in as well, and the September 2025 revision widened that opening twice: interns were named alongside employed students, and the old restriction that gave a working student nothing beyond reimbursement of compulsorily payable non-refundable fees was replaced with eligibility for all components, so the maintenance, disability and book heads now come with it (DEPwD office memorandum). The ceiling is still tested on the student's own earnings added to the family's.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

Certain courses are named and shut out regardless of the student: Aircraft Maintenance Engineer's courses, Private Pilot Licence courses, training at the Ship Dufferin, now Rajendra, training at the Military College in Dehradun, and courses at pre-examination training centres run at all-India or State level (scheme guidelines).

Money also stops in situations that have nothing to do with eligibility. Nothing is paid for the internship or houseman-ship period of an M.B.B.S. course, or for practical training in any other course, where the student draws remuneration or an allowance during it. Changing the subject of the course the award was granted for can get the scholarship cancelled outright, and a student who abandons the course part-way through the year is liable to refund what was paid (scheme guidelines).

The bar on a second award bites from a date, not from an academic year. The general condition stops payment under this scheme from the day the scholar accepts any other scholarship or stipend, so an award taken mid-session ends the post-matric money at that point rather than at the close of the year (scheme guidelines). Where two land together, the portal FAQ leaves the choice with the student, routed through the Head of the Institution (DEPwD portal FAQ).

Continuation

Renewal conditions

One renewal clause in the umbrella guidelines is written for post-matric scholars and nobody else: fail an examination the first time and the award may still be renewed. From a second failure the student carries their own costs until promotion comes (scheme guidelines). Everything around that clause is ordinary. The award holds from the stage it was granted at until the course ends, conduct and attendance permitting, and each year turns on promotion to the next higher class.

Two more situations are written in. Missing the annual examination through illness, or through anything else nobody saw coming, is survivable: the renewal goes through on a medical certificate plus a written view from the Head of the Institution that the scholar would have passed had they sat it. A student whom the university promotes provisionally, and who has to retake the junior class later, still draws the scholarship for the class they were promoted into (scheme guidelines).

Filing a renewal is lighter than filing fresh, and since the September 2025 memorandum lighter still: a renewal no longer goes to the State Nodal Officer for verification at all (DEPwD office memorandum). On the portal it reuses last year's Application ID and password, with only fee details and the previous year's marks left to update, and a scholar who tries to apply again as a fresh candidate while the course is still running has the application rejected (DEPwD portal FAQ).

What you get

Award & benefits

Five heads make up the award, and only two of them are capped by what the institution actually charges.

There is no reader allowance, escort allowance or helper allowance in that list, and searches for one usually land on the wrong component. Those are paid at Rs 2,000 a month under the Top Class Education scholarship, not under post-matric, where the disability-linked money is the flat annual allowance in the table (scheme guidelines). DEPwD's own scheme page repeats the post-matric figures in the same shape, so the two official sources agree (DEPwD, Post Matric Scholarship for Students with Disabilities).

Get admitted on the 21st and a month goes. An admission after the 20th day of a month is paid only from the month that follows it; otherwise the money begins with the month of admission, or with 1 April where the admission came before that, and it keeps running through the holidays until the month the examinations finish. On renewal it picks up from the month after the last one paid in the previous year. Everything is credited by DBT to the Aadhaar-linked bank account (scheme guidelines).

• Maintenance Allowance (₹ per Month): Group 1: All Bachelor’s/Post-Graduate Degree Courses in Medicine, Engineering/Technology, Planning/Architecture, Fashion Technology, Management, Business/Finance Administration, Computer Science/Applications, Agriculture, Veterinary and Allied Sciences; Hostellers – 1600/-; Day Scholars – 750/-.1. Group 2: Professional Courses leading to Degree / Diploma, Certificate in areas like Pharmacy (B.Pharma), LLB, BFS, other para-medical branches like Rehabilitation, Diagnostics etc., Mass Communication, Hotel Management & Catering, Travel/Tourism/Hospitality, Interior Decoration, Nutrition & Dietetics, Commercial Art, Financial Services (e.g. Banking Insurance, Taxation etc.); Hostellers – 1100/-; Day Scholars – 700/-.1. Group 3: All other courses leading to a Graduate Degree not covered under Group 1 and 2, e.g. BA/B.Sc/B.Com etc. Hostellers – 950/-; Day Scholars – 650/-.1. Group 4: All Post-Matriculation Level Non-Degree courses for which entrance qualification is High School (Class 10th), e.g. Senior Secondary Certificate (Class 11th and 12th), both general and vocational stream, ITI courses, 3-year diploma courses in Polytechnics etc. Hostellers – 900/-; Day Scholars – 550/-.
• Disability Allowances (₹/Annum): Visually Impaired – 4000/-.- Hearing Impaired – 2000/-.- Physically Disabled (OH) – 2000/-.- Intellectual Disabilities – 4000/-.- All other types of disability not covered above – 2000/-.
• Book Allowance: ₹1500/- per annum.

What to prepare

Documents required

Whether you upload anything at all depends on the size of your award. Where the scholarship amount is under Rs 50,000, no document is uploaded to the portal and the papers go to the school or institution instead; above that figure, the student uploads a photograph, the parental income certificate, Aadhaar, the disability certificate, the previous year's mark sheet, the current year's tuition fee receipt and a bank passbook or cancelled cheque before final submission (DEPwD portal FAQ).

The income certificate is the one that gets applications marked defective. It has to be signed by the revenue authority, and Form 16 is not accepted in its place. Where the parent or guardian is self-employed the declaration must come as a certificate from a Revenue Officer authorised by the State or Union Territory, and an employed parent with any additional source of income needs a consolidated certificate from that officer covering all of it (scheme guidelines).

Step by step

How to apply

Applications are called for only through the National Scholarship Portal at scholarships.gov.in, and there is no offline route for this component (scheme guidelines). Two things have to exist before the form will submit: your One Time Registration number, and consent given on the UDID portal to share your disability record, which NSP now states is a hard precondition for any disabled applicant (National Scholarship Portal). Filing through a Common Service Centre is an alternative, priced at Rs 30 for the whole activity including registration, biometric authentication, the OTR number and the completed form.

Your institution has to be registered on the portal and has to verify what you entered. If the college name is missing from the dropdown, the fix is to have the institute contact the nodal officer of the State it sits in, rather than to file anyway. After that, the application moves through institute verification, then State verification against the uploaded documents, then PFMS bank validation, and the State Nodal Officer digitally signs it before it reaches the Ministry (DEPwD portal FAQ). Studying outside your home State changed in 2025: a fresh application now has to be recommended by the Education or Welfare Department of the State where the student is studying, not the State of permanent residence (DEPwD office memorandum).

Where the Application Sits, and Where the Money Is

Status lives in two different places, and students routinely check only the first. The application itself is tracked on NSP under "Check your Status" using the Application ID with the date of birth or password, and the portal sends an SMS whenever the file is sitting unactioned at a verification level. If a verifying officer marks it defective, the reason comes by SMS and the correction has to be resubmitted inside the window. The money is tracked separately, on the PFMS portal under "Track NSP Payment", again against the Application ID (DEPwD portal FAQ).

A sanctioned application can still fail at the bank. PFMS validates the IFSC code and account number and rejects the application outright if they are wrong, and the Department's own list of precautions is narrow: the account details entered must be the Aadhaar-verified ones, a merged bank's new IFSC code must be entered, the account must be active, and it must be free of any maximum transaction limit that would bounce the credit (DEPwD portal FAQ).

How winners are picked

Selection process

Meeting the eligibility test does not earn a scholarship, because the slots are fixed. There is one merit criterion and marks are not it. What ranks an applicant is the disability percentage carried on the certificate, with a specific learning disability certificate that records nothing more precise than 40 per cent or above counted at 40. Two applicants who land on the same percentage are separated on age, the older of them going ahead (scheme guidelines).

How those slots reach applicants is the part of the scheme that moved most recently, and the guidelines PDF has not caught up with it. The text still on that page distributes slots State by State, averaging each State's share of eligible applications with its share of the country's population of persons with disabilities. The memorandum of 4 September 2025 replaced the paragraph outright: once the State has verified a fresh application, a merit list is drawn on the disability-percentage and age rules above, and the final selection on the portal runs against the slots available for fresh applications (DEPwD office memorandum). 50 per cent of the slots stay reserved for female candidates, and only where enough eligible women are not found do those go to men. Slots can also be moved between the pre-matric, post-matric and Top Class components where one of them is short of applications, with the approval of the Secretary, DEPwD (scheme guidelines).

Fine print

Terms & conditions

Continued payment rests on the Head of the Institution. A report from that office, made at any point in the year, that the scholar has by their own default not made satisfactory progress, or has been guilty of misconduct, is enough for the sanctioning authority to cancel the award or hold back further payment for as long as it thinks fit. Strikes and unpermitted irregularity in attendance are the two examples the guidelines name (scheme guidelines).

False information carries the heaviest consequence in the document. Cancellation is immediate where the scholarship was obtained on a false statement. Whatever has already been paid can be recovered, at DEPwD's discretion, and the guidelines put the student on a blacklist that bars them from scholarship under any scheme forever. A recovery charge of 15 per cent compound interest does sit in the umbrella scheme, but in the National Overseas Scholarship and Free Coaching chapters; the clause that governs a post-matric scholar names no rate. On the monitoring side, DEPwD tracks the scheme through the portal, States keep beneficiary lists district-wise and category-wise, and physical verification covers at least 10 per cent of units picked at random by an algorithm. Any litigation arising from the scheme goes only to the courts of the National Capital Territory of Delhi (scheme guidelines).

Get help

Contact

Portal problems and scheme questions go to different desks. The NSP helpdesk answers on helpdesk@nsp.gov.in and 0120-6619540, and the PFMS helpdesk, which is the one to use when an approved application has not paid out, on helpdesk-pfms@gov.in and the toll-free 1800 118 111; both run 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM on all days except government holidays (National Scholarship Portal helpdesk). Contact details for the nodal officer of your State are listed on the portal itself, under the option to find your State Nodal Officer (DEPwD portal FAQ).

The Department's own address, printed on the memorandum that last revised this scheme, is the B-I wing of Pandit Deendayal Antyodaya Bhawan, CGO Complex, Lodhi Road, New Delhi (DEPwD office memorandum).

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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