Pre Matric Scholarship For Scheduled Tribe Students(PRE-ST)

Overview

About PRE-ST

A Scheduled Tribe student in Class IX is owed Rs 225 a month under the guidelines the Ministry of Tribal Affairs runs this scheme on today. The Tamil Nadu Directorate of Tribal Welfare still publishes Rs 150 a month for the same central scheme, and still puts the parental income ceiling at Rs 2.00 lakh rather than Rs 2.50 lakh. Both figures sit on real Government of India paperwork, and both were replaced by orders the Ministry issued afterwards: the rate in December 2019, the ceiling in April 2020. Which number a family is quoted at the school counter depends on which document the office in front of them happens to be reading.

This scholarship buys two years and nothing more. It covers Classes IX and X, it is available for studies in India only, and it is awarded by the Government of the State or Union Territory the student is domiciled in, on that State's own terms of domicile (Pre-Matric Scholarship guidelines 2021-22 to 2025-26, Ministry of Tribal Affairs). A family that finds it in Class X has already missed half of what was on offer.

The reason it stops where it does is the reason it exists. The scheme was built to hold ST children through the elementary to secondary transition, where the drop-out rate is highest, and to leave them in a position to move on to the post-matric stage (scheme guidelines).

It reaches a lot of children in a few places. Answering Lok Sabha in December 2025, the Ministry put the number of ST students paid under the pre-matric scheme at 9,08,138 in 2024-25, and the annexure behind that answer shows where they are: Madhya Pradesh 2,12,347, Jharkhand 1,29,142, Gujarat 1,24,886 and Odisha 1,22,029, which is more than half the country's beneficiaries in four States (Pre-Matric and Post-Matric Tribal Scholarships, Press Information Bureau). The same annexure names 30 States and Union Territories and Maharashtra is not one of them, while Andhra Pradesh, Nagaland and Telangana are shown as not having reported for the year at all.

Against those numbers the money is modest, which is what a per-head rate of a few hundred rupees a month produces: Rs 163.69 crore released to the States and Union Territories in FY 2024-25 (funds released under Pre-Matric Scholarship for ST students, Press Information Bureau).

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

There is no national closing date to miss, because the guidelines never set one. They ask States to make all efforts to open the portal by 1 April, offer the calendar below, and then say in the same breath that the timelines are only suggestive (scheme guidelines).

What binds a household is the date its own State advertises, in the local language, in the leading newspapers of the State and on the State's website, and States are asked to run awareness work through civil society organisations and panchayati raj institutions alongside the advertisement (scheme guidelines). One line under the table is worth holding a State to: for renewal students, disbursement is meant to start as and when verification is complete, rather than waiting for the October date.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Everything turns on a list of six conditions in the current guidelines. The student has to belong to a Scheduled Tribe notified in relation to the State or Union Territory he or she actually belongs to; study in a Government school, or one recognised by Government or by a Central or State Board of Secondary Education; have family income from all sources of not more than Rs 2.5 lakh a year; hold a valid account in a Scheduled Bank linked to Aadhaar and a mobile number; not be getting any other scholarship; and not already have been paid for the class being claimed.

Three of the income rules quietly widen the scheme, and most families never hear them. A brother or sister earning in the same household does not push the family over the line, because only the father's and the mother's incomes go into the calculation. Where one parent has died, the survivor's income is the whole test. And a child who has lost both parents and is supported by a guardian is not income tested at all, because the guidelines state that the income criteria do not apply in that case.

One rule narrows it just as quietly. Income here means gross income from all sources, before any of the exemptions and deductions the Income Tax Act allows, so a salary that looks comfortably inside Rs 2,50,000 after deductions may not be inside it at all (income criteria, scheme guidelines).

The certificate that proves it is dated, not just signed. It is taken once, at admission to Class IX, and is valid for Class X as well; it has to have been issued in the same year the admission was taken; and where a parent draws a salary, the previous financial year's income is the one that counts (scheme guidelines).

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

What removes most students is arithmetic rather than conduct. A class is paid for once. A child who has to repeat Class IX carries no scholarship into the second attempt and can pick the award up again only on being promoted (scheme guidelines).

Holding something else ends it too, and the two versions of the rule are worth telling apart. The current conditions bar a student who is getting any other scholarship at all; the 2012 order the scheme started under barred only a student already drawing another centrally funded pre-matric scholarship, which is the narrower test many older State circulars still repeat.

Misstating a fact is the one failure that reaches past the current year, and the two rulebooks punish it at very different lengths. The current guidelines dispose of it in a line, ineligibility plus liability to be debarred from the scheme (scheme guidelines); the 2012 order spent a clause on each consequence, cancellation forthwith, recovery of what had already been paid, and blacklisting from scholarship under any scheme forever. Leaving mid-year is treated as a refund question rather than a bar: under that same order a student who discontinued the studies the award was made for was liable to refund it, at the State's discretion.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

This award renews once and then it is finished. Class IX to Class X is the only step it has, and the step is conditional on passing: the award continues subject to good conduct and regularity in attendance, and is renewed for Class X after the student passes Class IX (scheme guidelines).

The second year is lighter on paper, mainly because the income certificate does not come back. Taken at admission to Class IX, it is valid for Class X too, so the document that usually holds a family up has already been produced (scheme guidelines).

Lighter is not earlier. The suggested timeline gives the renewal claim its own column and then fills that column with the same four dates it gives a fresh one, so a household that treats Class X as already settled has no extra room and can lose the year exactly the way a first time applicant does.

What you get

Award & benefits

The rate has two parts and only one of them has moved since the scheme began. The order that launched it in 2012 set the monthly scholarship at 150 for day scholars and 350 for hostellers, and a Ministry order of December 2019 raised those figures to 225 and 525 with effect from the 2019-20 academic session. What the December order did not touch is the books and ad hoc grant underneath those rates, which still stands where the 2012 order put it.

The grant on the last row is the part most summaries of this scheme drop, and it behaves differently from the rest: it is an annual figure, not a monthly one, and it is paid whether the child boards or goes home.

A Divyangjan student draws a second amount that is worth more across a year than the scholarship it is added to: Rs 800 a month as a hosteller and Rs 600 a month as a day scholar, which come to Rs 9600 and Rs 7200 for the year (guidelines). It is claimed on a disability certified by a competent medical authority of the State or Union Territory, and a student who is leprosy cured or living with sickle cell anaemia or thalassemia claims it on the same footing. It also outlasts the scholarship inside the year, because the scholarship is payable for 10 months and this allowance for all twelve.

That single allowance replaced something far more detailed and far narrower. The 2012 order reached ST students with disabilities only if they were in private unaided recognised schools, and paid them through five named heads: a reader allowance for blind students, a transport allowance, an escort allowance for the severely disabled and a helper allowance, each at Rs 160 a month, and a coaching allowance at Rs 240. A page still listing those five is quoting a superseded document.

What to prepare

Documents required

Six things are asked for and one of them is a photograph. The other five are an Aadhaar number, a certificate of domicile, an ST certificate from the State's competent authority, a family income certificate, and, where it applies, a disability certificate (scheme guidelines).

The route this scheme used to run on is the one it now refuses. Under the 2012 order a self employed parent proved the family income by swearing an affidavit on non judicial stamp paper, and a renewing student attached a countersigned receipt for last year's scholarship; the current guidelines will not accept a self declaration or an affidavit of self assessed income at all, and put the State under a duty to notify an authority that issues the certificate instead (scheme guidelines). A school still handing out the affidavit form is working from the older rulebook.

Three of those six are handed back to the State to design: it specifies the procedure for issuing the ST certificate, the family income certificate and the disability certificate, and names the authority that signs each. A State whose issuing system is already online can put the results into DigiLocker and let the portal pull them, which is as close as this scheme comes to a family uploading nothing. One requirement behind that list is not the family's to meet at all: the school has to hold a valid AISHE, U-DISE, NCVT or SCVT code before it goes on the portal, and a school that is not on it yet has to be added there by its nodal officer before any application from it can be verified (scheme guidelines).

Step by step

How to apply

The State that decides this claim is the one the student belongs to, not the one the school stands in. A student who belongs to one State but studies in another is awarded the scholarship by the home State and submits the application to the competent authority there (scheme guidelines).

Which screen that means varies by State, by design. Writing the platform that invites the applications and pays the scholarship into the student's account by DBT is the State's own obligation under the guidelines, and a State that would rather not write one is allowed to take the National Scholarship Portal instead (scheme guidelines). The first question for a Class IX family is therefore not how to fill the form but which of those two their State runs this scheme on.

The bank account condition is worth reading before Class IX starts, because a fourteen year old often does not have one. The account has to be in a Scheduled Bank, active rather than dormant, linked to Aadhaar and to a mobile number, and it may be held in the name of the student or the parent. The same paragraph asks the family to keep that mobile number for the whole period of the scholarship and to get any change recorded (scheme guidelines).

A submitted form then climbs three rungs. The Institute Nodal Officer verifies first, then the District and then the State Nodal Officer, and at every rung the application can be verified, rejected, or marked defective, with the reason recorded so that it can be displayed to the applicant (scheme guidelines).

Defective and rejected are not the same status, and the difference decides whether the year survives. A defective application is one the family is expected to repair by rectifying the errors and complying with the remarks written on it. An application marked rejected by a nodal officer will not be considered for further processing on the National Scholarship Portal in the States that sit on it (scheme guidelines). Two of the instructions in that same paragraph are addressed to the family and not to any officer, and in Class IX the family means a parent: the school has to be pushed until it has verified, while the window is still open, and the SMS the State portal or NSP sends has to be acted on rather than left unread.

Where a pre-matric payment becomes visible is not the screen that accepted the form. The National Scholarship Portal keeps three separate checks on its front page, one for application status, one headed Track Your Payment and one for Aadhaar seeding status, and the money itself reaches the student by direct benefit transfer, preferably through the Aadhaar Enabled Payment System. The Ministry's own Direct Benefit Transfer portal answers a different question again: it reports the national total released under the pre-matric scheme, Rs 155.19 crore for FY 2025-26, and lists the scheme as active under the code BPVGK, but it holds nothing about any one student's claim.

How winners are picked

Selection process

The paragraph of the guidelines headed Selection of Candidates never selects anybody. What sits under that heading is registration machinery: the State builds the portal, obtains the documents from the student, and has them checked at three levels (scheme guidelines). No cut off mark, no ranking of one applicant against another and no cap on how many awards a State may make appears anywhere in it.

One sentence went missing on the way there. The 2012 order opened its own selection paragraph by stating that all eligible Scheduled Tribe candidates will be given scholarships as prescribed in the scheme; the current paragraph carries no such sentence, and puts procedure where the promise used to be.

What the process really screens for is duplication. States have to maintain a complete database of beneficiaries across the various scholarship schemes so that the same student is not funded twice (scheme guidelines), which is the working form of the rule that a student may hold only one scholarship.

What this section does audit is the money, not the applicant. Where fraudulent use of funds is detected, the State has to hold an enquiry within a fixed time and report the outcome to the Ministry, and it has to hand data and beneficiary details to whichever agency the Ministry's Evaluation and Monitoring Division or NITI Aayog's Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office sends to review the scheme (scheme guidelines).

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The centre puts up the larger share of this scholarship and still moves second. The Government of India's contribution is 75% and the State's 25%, moving to 90% and 10% for the North Eastern and hilly States, and the guidelines name Andaman and Nicobar as the kind of Union Territory, without a legislative assembly and without grants of its own, where the centre carries the whole cost (funding pattern, scheme guidelines).

The central share is released on compliance rather than on a date. Before the next instalment moves, the State has to have spent last year's grant and filed the utilisation certificate, shown the disbursement to beneficiaries in PFMS, put in its own matching share, submitted a statement of expenditure, opened its portal for online applications, and estimated this year's spend from last year's actual (scheme guidelines). A student waiting on a payment is often waiting on one of those items, in an office they will never see.

How the central share travels is still being changed. The Ministry says it intends to devise a mechanism with the National Scholarship Portal so that the central share can be released straight into students' bank accounts, and that until that exists the central share goes to the States, which add their own contribution and pay the student by DBT (scheme guidelines).

The terms are not fixed either. The provisions of the scheme can be changed at any time with the approval of the competent authority in the Ministry of Tribal Affairs (scheme guidelines), which is why a rate or a ceiling read off a State page rather than off the current guidelines is worth checking twice.

Get help

Contact

The guidelines put one office behind this scholarship and it belongs to the State. They ask every State and Union Territory to stand up a dedicated cell under its Scholarship Division and give it the whole chain: preparing the portal, integrating the schools with it, verifying documents and eligibility, checking that the bank account is Aadhaar linked, and disbursing. The helpdesk a family actually reaches is part of that cell, and its stated first job is assistance with the registration and application forms, with whatever it cannot settle escalated (scheme guidelines).

Where a State publishes those details, they are local and specific. Tamil Nadu names its Project Officers and District Adi Dravidar and Tribal Welfare Officers as the people to approach for this scheme, and its Directorate of Tribal Welfare in Chennai publishes an Adi Dravidar Welfare scholarship helpline on 1800 599 7638 alongside the address dir.dtw@tn.gov.in (Pre-Matric Scholarship for IX and X Students of ST, Directorate of Tribal Welfare, Tamil Nadu).

For a fault in the portal rather than in the claim, the National Scholarship Portal publishes lists of nodal officers by scheme and by district.

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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