Pre-Matric & Post-Matric Scholarship(PMPMS)

The Directorate advertises all its schemes together, once a year, and the scholarship window is whatever that advertisement says. For 2026-27 the portal opened on 25 August 2026 and closes on 5 October 2026, on an advertisement the Director issued on 24 August 2026 (Advertisement Notice for 2026-27).

Read the notice board rather than a calendar, because extensions are the norm here and they are scheme-specific. In the previous cycle the pre-matric last date was extended to 31 July 2025 by a standalone notice, and the portal was later reopened for twelve more days, to 31 August 2025, to take left-out post-matric applications (Notice board, SIRISH). Extensions have been announced for one scheme and not another in the same year, so a pre-matric applicant cannot read a post-matric extension as covering them.

Two things are checked before anything else: that the applicant is a permanent resident of Assam, and that the applicant belongs to the Tea Tribes and Adivasi community, evidenced by a caste certificate issued at district level. Everything after that is about the class the student sits in and the money the household declares.

The income test has moved, and applicants who were rejected years ago on it should look again. The 2018 notification set two separate ceilings, Rs 1,50,000 a year for the pre-matric half and Rs 2,50,000 for the post-matric half (Tea Tribes Welfare Department guideline, 5 June 2018). The Directorate's current advertisement puts one ceiling on both, Rs 5 lakh a year, declared by the parent or guardian on the Department's own undertaking format (Advertisement Notice for 2026-27). That is a wide gate by scholarship standards, and it is the reason the community, not the income slab, is the real filter here.

A third condition sits outside the guideline's eligibility clause, and it is the one that strands a Class 9 applicant who has never needed a bank. The current advertisement lists an Aadhaar-seeded scheduled bank account among the minimum eligibility items, alongside residence and community (Advertisement Notice for 2026-27). The 2018 notification explains from the department's side why it is treated that seriously: it instructs Sub-Divisional Welfare Officers to satisfy themselves that account numbers and IFSC codes are correct in all respects, and that every account belongs to the beneficiary student alone. Getting a younger child's own account opened is therefore part of applying, not something to sort out after a sanction is announced.

The bars here are mostly about double-dipping and about gaming the sub-division system. A student already drawing a scholarship or stipend from any government department cannot hold this one at the same time, which rules out anyone already sanctioned under a central scholarship for the same year. Government-funded pre-examination coaching is treated the same way.

The two that catch people out are structural. A student who has been detained cannot claim the scholarship twice for the same class, so a repeated year breaks the chain rather than extending it. And an application filed from more than one sub-division in the same cycle is not merely deduplicated, it is discarded: the Directorate's advertisement states that in no case shall such applicants be considered (Advertisement Notice for 2026-27). Families who have moved between gardens during the year should file from one sub-division only and keep the address consistent with the caste certificate.

The course bar is the one worth reading twice, because the guideline writes it as an exception buried inside a permission. Post-matric support covers every recognised post-matriculation or post-secondary course in a recognised institution "except certain identified training courses like Engineer's course, private pilot License course etc." (Tea Tribes Welfare Department guideline, 5 June 2018). A student heading into a professional or vocational stream should settle that question with the Sub-Divisional Welfare Officer before filling the form, not after the list has moved.

Neither half has a renewal form. A student who applied last year returns as an existing applicant on the login already created, and the upload list shrinks to the mark sheet of the last examination passed plus one current-year document. That second document is where the halves part: pre-matric wants the headmaster's certificate for the current year, post-matric wants the current year's admission fee receipt or a recommendation from the principal (Pre-Matric Scholarship, SIRISH, Post-Matric Scholarship, SIRISH).

The practical effect is that renewal is an annual re-application with the identity documents taken as read. Birth certificate, caste certificate, Aadhaar and passbook are asked for once; academic progress is asked for every year. Since the detained-student rule bites at exactly this point, the mark sheet is doing more work than it looks: it is what proves the student moved up a class and is therefore claiming for a class not claimed before.

The rate is fixed by class or course, not by fee, not by hostel status, and not by district. The guideline publishes one figure per stage and nothing else beside it: no maintenance allowance, no fee reimbursement, no hostel or book head.

Those are the amounts that were actually paid, not just notified. Every row of the pre-matric beneficiary list for 2021-22 carries Rs 3,000 against the student's account number, and the post-matric list of the same year prints Rs 5,000 beside a higher secondary student and Rs 7,000 beside a degree student, row after row (Pre-Matric beneficiaries, 2021-22, Post-Matric beneficiaries, 2021-22).

Payment is made directly to the student by electronic transfer, with the Directorate keeping the records and reporting utilisation to the Government. The guideline sets 31 March of each financial year as the targeted period of completion, so a sanctioned scholarship is meant to land inside the financial year it was applied for, not the academic one.

The Department publishes its own formats for the two documents students most often get wrong, and both download from the scheme pages: the undertaking on annual family income, signed by the parent or guardian, and the headmaster's recommendation letter. That letter is a fill-in-the-blanks certificate rather than a free-text reference, naming the student's village or tea estate, post office, sub-division, district and the class the student is presently in, under the headmaster's seal (Annexure for Pre-Matric Scholarship). Write it on the printed format; a letter on school letterhead that leaves one of those lines out is the kind of gap a sub-division sends back.

Everything else is a scan of an original. A fresh pre-matric applicant uploads a recent passport-size photograph and a scanned signature, the birth certificate, the caste certificate, the income undertaking, the mark sheet of the last examination passed, the headmaster's certificate, the Aadhaar card, and the first page of the Aadhaar-seeded scheduled bank passbook (Pre-Matric Scholarship, SIRISH, Online Application System user manual). A fresh post-matric applicant proves age with the birth certificate, the HSLC admit card or the HSLC pass certificate, and puts the admission fee receipt for the course being pursued, or the principal's recommendation, where the headmaster's certificate would have gone (Post-Matric Scholarship, SIRISH). Every slot on the upload page prints its own maximum size and the image format it will accept, so a phone photograph of a certificate usually has to be shrunk before it will go up.

For 2026-27 the Directorate receives applications for both halves through SIRISH and nowhere else, so the first task is an account rather than a form (Advertisement Notice for 2026-27). Sign-up is Aadhaar-first: the portal asks a new applicant for an Aadhaar number, the mobile number seeded to that Aadhaar, and a password of their own choosing (How to Register, SIRISH). The department's manual adds the step that trips people on a weak network in a garden, an OTP delivered by SMS that has to be keyed in before the login ID exists at all (Online Application System user manual).

Inside the dashboard the form moves through five numbered tabs: select the scheme, enter personal details, upload the documents, update the bank details with account number, bank name, branch name and IFSC code, then preview the whole application and make the final submission. District, assembly constituency, sub-division, GP or VCDC and tea garden all come from dropdowns, with an "others" box to type in a garden the list does not carry, and every field on the form is compulsory. A half-finished file can be abandoned with the Cancel Current Application button at any stage, and the preview screen shows every document uploaded and lets you reopen the exact tab that needs a correction before you submit (Online Application System user manual).

There are two different things to follow afterwards, and they are not in the same place. The file is followed inside the login: the application number appears at the upper right of the APPLICATION STATUS tab once submission succeeds, and that screen reports the stage the file has reached, opening at verification pending, while the GRIEVANCE tab next to it is where a file that has stopped moving gets raised. The money is followed outside the login, because the Directorate publishes its sanctioned list for each scholarship as a PDF that prints the application ID, sub-division, bank and sanctioned amount against every selected name, with the post-matric list adding the guardian's name, the tea garden and the course being pursued (List of selected beneficiaries for five scholarship schemes, 2021-22). Reading your own application ID off that list is the only public confirmation that a sanction was made, which is reason enough to save the number the portal issued rather than trusting the acknowledgement slip to turn up when it is needed.

Nothing here is scored and nothing is ranked, and the guideline is oddly silent about it: the clause headed "Selection of process" is printed with nothing under it, so the route has to be read out of the implementation clause instead (Tea Tribes Welfare Department guideline). What that clause describes is the Sub-Divisional Level Beneficiary Selection Committees sitting at the front of the process rather than the end of it, helping students get their forms in and passing them to the Sub-Divisional Welfare Officer; he ascertains the correctness of each form in all respects and sends his sub-division's consolidated list on to the Directorate, with the bank account and IFSC of every student on it. Since the move online that officer holds the same power inside the portal, where his three options on a submitted application are to verify, to recommend or reject, and to forward it upward (Online Application System user manual).

Rupnagar is the second desk, not the first. On the forwarded applications the Director's own three options in the portal are to approve, to reject, or to return them to the Sub-Divisional Welfare Officer for re-verification (Online Application System user manual), and the guideline then requires the Chairman of the State Level Advisory Committee to approve before the beneficiary list is finalised. A file therefore travels back down for another look rather than falling out of the process, which is one reason a status can sit unchanged for weeks without meaning much. No marks floor, merit rank or cut-off percentage appears in either document: a complete, verified and eligible application is a sanctioned one.

The conditions students sign up to are mostly the eligibility bars restated as continuing obligations: hold no other government scholarship while holding this one, stay out of government-funded pre-examination coaching, and apply from one sub-division only. Nothing in the guideline provides for a partial year or a mid-year switch of course.

On the administrative side the notification hands the Directorate four standing duties and no more: keep proper records, monitor how the scheme is being implemented, file a monthly progress report with the Government, and submit the utilisation certificate in time (Tea Tribes Welfare Department guideline). What it does not create is an appeal: there is no published route for contesting a rejection, and the only second look on record is the re-verification the Director can send back down. For the applicant the practical consequence is documentary, because the bank details typed into the form are what the transfer follows, and a name on the account that does not match the name on the application is the failure that surfaces after sanction rather than before it.

The Directorate of Tea Tribes and Adivasi Welfare sits at Rupnagar, Guwahati-32. It answers on +91 88221-39494 and at director-ttw@assam.gov.in or directoratetgtoffice00@gmail.com (Contact Us, SIRISH).

Each of the two scholarships also has its own named desk, and the officer, mobile number and working hours are printed at the foot of that scheme's page on the portal (Pre-Matric Scholarship, SIRISH, Post-Matric Scholarship, SIRISH). They are two different names, so read the page for the half you are applying under rather than calling the switchboard. Verification questions about a submitted file belong with the Sub-Divisional Welfare Officer of the sub-division it was filed from.