Prime Minister’s Fellowship for Doctoral Research(PMFDR)

Overview

About PMFDR

You cannot apply for this fellowship on your own. The form is a joint one, filed by a PhD scholar and a company together, and the company has to have committed to matching the government's money before the scholar can complete it. Applications without an industry partner are not accepted by the online system at all, and the Confederation of Indian Industry, which runs the scheme, will not find a partner for you, per the portal's application FAQ. That single condition separates this award from every other doctoral fellowship in the country, and from the one it is most often mistaken for.

The scheme's own call document describes it as a public private partnership of the Anusandhan National Research Foundation and the Confederation of Indian Industry, in Science, Technology, Engineering, Agriculture and Medicine, per the PMFDR How to Apply document. The Prime Minister's Research Fellowship is a different award with a different ministry behind it, and the two are routinely searched as if they were one.

More than 350 PM Fellows have been supported since 2012, with more than 130 institutes and 300 companies involved, and the custodian changed underneath that count: CII's page records the Anusandhan National Research Foundation, created under the ANRF Act, 2023 and subsuming the Science and Engineering Research Board, as the government side of the partnership today, per About PMFDR. Nothing lapsed in the handover. The most recent recommended-candidate lists, published after the Apex Council sat in November 2025, carry the ANRF masthead, and both chambers are still taking registrations.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

PMFDR has had no application window since September 2014, when the scheme went open-ended, and a scholar may file on any day of the year provided the 14 month clock from PhD admission has not run out, per About PMFDR.

What carries dates is the review cycle, and it is published as a cut-off for a particular Apex Council sitting rather than as a deadline for the scheme. The 22nd meeting of the Apex Council was held on 22 November 2025, covering applications received till 12 November 2025, per the recommended candidates list. Its recommendations went up as two dated PDFs on the portal's results page, which doubles as the archive: every list back to the 2013 batch is still posted there, which is the fastest way to read how often the council has actually met. Disbursement to a selected fellow starts in April, or in the month named in the selection communication, and runs monthly from there.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The clock disqualifies more applicants than the marks do. You must have taken admission to a full-time PhD in a recognised Indian university, institute or research laboratory within 14 months of the date you submit, and where the admission and registration dates differ, the first admission date governs, per the PMFDR How to Apply document. That figure is not arbitrary. The original call explains that university rules place final PhD registration anywhere between 6 and 14 months after initial enrolment, two semesters of coursework included, and the window was drawn wide enough to cover all of them, per the PM Fellowship Scheme call. A scholar already in the third year of a PhD sits outside the scheme whatever the research is worth.

The second gate is the company, and it has to be in place before you file. The partner must be registered under the Indian Companies Act, which includes multinationals registered in India, must commit to co-funding for up to four years, and must supply an industry mentor as co-supervisor. Your host institution has its own paperwork to issue, a no objection certificate and a letter of commitment, because it is agreeing to let you work at the company's premises when the project needs it.

Neither the call document nor the portal publishes an age limit, and neither sets a minimum percentage in the qualifying degree. What is asked for instead is an excellent academic record, which the Apex Council reads off the file rather than against a cut-off.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

Three bars sit outside the eligibility test, and the strictest is about who the company is allowed to be. The 2013-14 call rules that the institution and the industry partner must not have any relationship in terms of ownership and business affiliations and must not be under a single group, per the PM Fellowship Scheme call. A scholar cannot, in other words, route the sponsorship through a company the host institute owns or shares a promoter with. The current call document then names the partner types the scheme does not accept in any form: NGOs, societies and government agencies, with ISRO and DRDO given as the worked examples, per the PMFDR How to Apply document. The third bar is on parallel money. A selected fellow must not receive any other fellowship or salary concurrently, which puts a funded research assistantship and this award in direct competition rather than in sequence.

One further restriction is aimed at the department rather than the scholar. No institutional overheads or management charges are payable under the scheme, per the same call document, so a host institute cannot treat the award as project money with a share of its own.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Continuation turns on two signatures, not one. The fellow files a written progress report each academic year, the Apex Council or a committee it nominates reviews it, and the next release of funds depends on satisfactory progress together with letters of recommendation from the research guide and the industry mentor, per the PMFDR How to Apply document.

One condition on the money sits entirely outside the fellow's control. Scholarship payment commences only when the partner company has made complete payment for the full year, per the recommended candidates list. Both the company and ANRF deposit their shares with CII annually and CII pays the scholar monthly, so a sponsor that pays late holds up a stipend the government side has already committed. Should the company withdraw support inside the four year commitment, the government share is withdrawn with it and the fellowship ends.

What you get

Award & benefits

The published amount has moved twice and three official documents still carry different figures, which is a dating problem rather than a contradiction between them.

Treat the 2026 call document as the operative figure and confirm the number written into your own selection letter, because the government half is pegged to the prevailing JRF and SRF slabs including house rent allowance and is revised whenever those are. The government component is capped to those slabs with no Research Associate provision under the scheme, per the PM Fellowship Scheme call.

For a monthly sense of it, CII's own page puts the average government doctoral fellowship in India at about Rs 25,000 a month including house rent allowance, and the doubled PMFDR figure at about Rs 1,00,000 a month, per About PMFDR. The fellowship is paid to the candidate directly by CII, every month.

What the money buys beyond itself is a co-supervisor from industry and a standing audience: ANRF describes the mentoring as running through annual review meetings, with periodic mentorship sessions arranged through outside expert agencies, on its research networking page. No contingency grant, no book grant and no travel allowance are published as separate heads anywhere in the scheme documents.

• Under this scheme, full-time PhD scholars get double the JRF/SRF fellowship amount, as a scholarship.
• The scheme has the provision to award up to 100 new scholarships every year. One-half of this scholarship comes from the government; the second half comes from a partner company that also works closely with the candidate on the research project.

What to prepare

Documents required

Most of the upload list is the paperwork any doctoral application collects, and two items on it are the ones applicants underestimate.

The first belongs to the company, not to you: its balance sheet, and for a small enterprise or a start-up a cash flow statement as well. The selection body is testing whether the sponsor can genuinely carry a four year commitment, so a young company should expect its accounts to be read as closely as your synopsis. The second is the pair of undertakings, one from the academic supervisor and the head of the institution, one from the industry partner, each on the format given in the application form. Neither can be produced the night before submission, because both need a valid signatory on the other side. The full current list sits in section 13 of the PMFDR How to Apply document, alongside the CVs of the scholar, the academic supervisor and the industry mentor.

Step by step

How to apply

Two portals take the same application and both are official. CII runs primeministerfellowshipscheme.in and FICCI runs pmrfdr.ficci.in, each as an implementing chamber for ANRF. Register as a student, download the call for proposal and the document checklist, tie up the company and get the undertakings signed by a valid signatory on both sides, then fill the form online. It cannot be downloaded and completed offline, it needs a live connection while you work on it, and no physical copy of anything is to be sent to CII, per the portal's application FAQ.

Use the Save option in that form. The same FAQ warns that a connection dropping before you submit costs you whatever was unsaved, and that the upload is one-shot: you may review and revise the form as many times as you like beforehand, but once it is uploaded it cannot be submitted again.

Tracking runs on three signals rather than a status bar. Submission triggers an automatic acknowledgement email, and the portal's own instruction if none arrives within 24 hours is to write to pm.scheme@cii.in rather than wait, per the same application FAQ. Between then and a decision, the student login is where the form sits. The outcome is not mailed to you first: recommended candidates go up as a dated PDF on the portal's results page, which is also the only place a non-selection is ever confirmed.

How winners are picked

Selection process

A high level Apex Council of academics, industry representatives and government officials reviews the applications and recommends the fellows, and up to 100 fellowships may be supported in a financial year, per the PMFDR How to Apply document. The council does not sit to a fixed calendar. Evaluation is run several times a year depending on how many applications have accumulated, so the queue you join matters as much as the date you file.

The criteria are weighted toward translation. Assessment covers scientific and technical merit, innovation with discrete research and development as opposed to exploratory investigation, potential for commercialisation and business impact, the capability of the scholar and the host institution, and the level of industry involvement, per the PMFDR How to Apply document. A proposal that is scientifically elegant with no route to a product is the profile this scheme is built not to fund. Selection is followed by a memorandum of agreement signed by four parties: the scholar, the company, the host institution and CII.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The two governing documents do not end the tenure at the same moment. The November 2025 terms make the fellowship tenable for a maximum of four years or until the final defence of the PhD thesis, whichever is earlier, per the recommended candidates list. The current call document says instead that it ceases on submission of the thesis, per the PMFDR How to Apply document. Months of stipend can sit between submission and defence, so the date that binds you is the one written into your own memorandum of agreement.

The award is tied to the place you win it in: once accepted, it cannot be transferred to another university, institute or laboratory at any stage. Two obligations then run from the fellow back to CII. A fellow who cannot continue for medical reasons must inform CII within two weeks, after which CII may defer the fellowship for a maximum of nine months or close it, and any change of address, telephone, email or bank detail must reach CII inside the same two weeks. ANRF and CII also reserve the right to revise the terms at any time. Even the exit is paperwork: the portal's standing announcement makes the exit form mandatory before a Letter of Completion is issued, on the portal home page.

Neither ANRF nor CII claims ownership of the intellectual property the research produces. Ownership is settled among the scholar, the institution and the company in the memorandum of agreement, and every publication and patent has to acknowledge ANRF, CII and the partner company. On where an unresolved dispute finally lands, the two documents again point in different directions, the November 2025 terms to the Secretary, DST, and the current call document to the CEO, ANRF.

Get help

Contact

The scheme desk is CII's, at the Mantosh Sondhi Centre on Lodi Road, New Delhi. It answers on pm.scheme@cii.in, and the current call document adds the two named officers directly, javed.ahmad@cii.in and akashdeep.singh@cii.in, with a line on +91 11 4577 1000 at extension 240, per the PMFDR How to Apply document. Applicants on the FICCI route go through pmrfdr.ficci.in or the older serbficci-iirrada.in address that ANRF still lists.

The funder keeps a separate desk. ANRF names Dr. Shashi Bhushan Pandey, Scientist G, as Program Advisor for the Prime Minister's Fellowship and Dr. Jacob V. V., Scientific Consultant, as Program Officer, on its research networking page. Write there about a rule; write to the chamber you registered on about your own file, since the acknowledgement and the result both come out of that portal.

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