Prime Minister’s Scholarship Scheme for the Wards of Central Armed Police Forces & Assam Rifles(PMSSWCAPFAR)

Overview

About PMSSWCAPFAR

Nothing in this scholarship turns on family income. It is rationed instead: a fixed 2,000 fresh awards each academic year for the whole Central Armed Police Forces and Assam Rifles population, split 1,000 for boys and 1,000 for girls, with a seven rung category queue deciding who inside that pool actually gets one. A serving head constable's son and the daughter of a man killed in action both clear the eligibility text; only one of them starts near the front. Your rung, and what the Ministry of Home Affairs treats as your qualifying exam, decide almost everything else.

The Prime Minister's Scholarship Scheme for CAPF and Assam Rifles wards is a merit ration, not a needs test. The Welfare and Rehabilitation Board runs it for the Ministry of Home Affairs and the money is drawn from the National Defence Fund, but the part that decides outcomes is arithmetic: 2,000 fresh awards a year shared across every central force the scheme covers, with the boys' and girls' quotas of 1,000 each locked so that a shortfall on one side is never handed to the other, per the official scheme FAQ on the National Scholarship Portal.

Two things follow from that design. First, renewals do not eat into the fresh pool: the Ministry of Home Affairs guidelines grant the 2,000 new scholarships each year in addition to the previous year's renewal cases, so a first year applicant is competing only against other first year applicants. Second, because the pool is fixed and the applicants are ranked, the honest question for most families is not "am I eligible" but "which rung am I on".

The scheme has been running since the 2006-07 academic year and it sits on NSP under the Ministry of Home Affairs, where the portal lists it as a merit based scheme called Prime Minister's Scholarship Scheme For Central Armed Police Forces And Assam Rifles, alongside two other schemes carrying the same PMSS name. Filing against the wrong one is a live risk rather than a hypothetical, because the states and UTs police version sits immediately above this scheme inside the Home Ministry's own block of that list.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

The scheme record on myScheme publishes no closing date, and that is not an omission: the guidelines fix a schedule for one academic year at a time, so the only dates worth acting on are the current cycle's. For 2026-27 the portal opened on 1 June 2026 and NSP prints three closing dates against this scheme's own entry.

Treat the institute deadline as your real one. A form submitted late in October that your college has not verified by the middle of November never reaches the merit list, and the two dates above sit only about a fortnight apart.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Two gates, and they are checked by different people. The service gate asks whose ward or widow you are, and it is verified by the force, not by your college. The academic gate asks for 60 percent in the Minimum Entry Qualification, and that one is verified by your institute.

MEQ is the exam that got you into your professional course, not the marks you are scoring inside it. Which exam counts changes with what you are studying, and the guidelines set it out course by course: an MBBS applicant is judged on 10+2, a B.Tech applicant on either 10+2 or a diploma, and an MBA or B.Ed applicant on a graduation result. If you cleared Class 12 from CBSE, the percentage is worked out on the best of five subjects out of 500. A student who entered the second year of a B.Tech through lateral entry after a diploma is eligible, and the NSP scheme FAQ is explicit that reaching the second year by ordinary promotion does not create a fresh claim.

Rank matters only at the bottom of the queue. There is no rank restriction for categories A to E, the ones built around death in action, disability attributable to service and gallantry awards. Categories F and G, which cover the wards of ex and serving personnel generally, are limited to personnel below officer rank. The guidelines carry one narrow carve out worth knowing if your parent holds a local rank of Assistant Commandant without the pay benefits of that rank and draws an Inspector's salary: that ward is still admitted under F and G.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

Category A does not rescue a bad college. Where the student is enrolled is tested on its own terms, so a college outside UGC or AICTE recognition, an engineering programme without NBA accreditation, or a medical course without the relevant regulator's approval ends the application whatever rung the family sits on and whatever the MEQ score was. Correspondence and distance learning are out, studying abroad is out, and the wards of civilian employees of CAPFs and Assam Rifles are out even though the parent works for the same force.

Course shape matters as much as course quality. This is a first professional degree scholarship, so a diploma that does not lead to a degree fails, a master's programme fails unless it is MBA or MCA, and B.Ed qualifies while a combined BA plus B.Ed does not.

One exclusion only bites after you have won. Changing your course or college after selection and taking fresh admission the following year causes the scholarship to be rejected permanently, not merely paused. And if ineligibility surfaces at any stage, the guidelines cancel the award without notice and blacklist the student from centrally sponsored scholarships for five years.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Renewal is a lower academic bar than entry and a stricter one than most students expect. Getting in needs 60 percent in MEQ once; staying in needs a pass in every subsequent academic year of the course with at least 50 percent, checked year on year. Miss a year's marks and the award stops, whatever your category.

There is a single, narrow allowance for lateness. Where the delay in filing the renewal application is on the candidate's side, a grace period of one year only may be entertained. It is discretionary wording, not a right, and it does not extend to a second missed year.

Renewal paperwork is shorter than the first application, and the current year's guidelines list it in one line: a service certificate from the Head of Office where the parent is still serving, a bonafide certificate from the institute, and the attested mark sheet for the previous academic year of the course.

What you get

Award & benefits

The rate is set by gender, not by course or by category, and it is credited once a year rather than every month despite being expressed as a monthly figure.

Tenure runs up to five years but is capped by the approved duration of your own course, so an MBBS student draws it for longer than a BCA student. Integrated programmes are treated as a partial award: for an integrated ME, M.Tech or M.Pharma the scholarship covers only the initial three or four years, because the scheme pays for a first professional degree and not for the postgraduate tail attached to it.

Fresh selectees also receive a personal letter from the Prime Minister in the appropriate language, dispatched through the force after the money has gone out.

• The applicant who is a girl, shall receive ₹3,000/- per month, totalling ₹36,000/- per year.
• The applicant who is a boy, shall receive ₹2,500/- per month, totalling ₹30,000/- per year.
• The amount is paid annually after selection.
• All applicants selected under the fresh category will be given personal letters from the Hon'ble Prime Minister in the appropriate language.
• Number of Scholarships: A total of 2,000 new scholarships are granted each academic year (in addition to renewal cases of the previous year), equally distributed between boys and girls (1,000 each).
• The quota of 1,000 each fixed for boys and girls is not interchangeable.
• Duration of Scholarship: Up to 5 years (depending upon the duration of the course being pursued by the applicant and as approved by the respective regulatory body).

What to prepare

Documents required

Read the document list as a proof of category, not as a checklist. Whichever letter you claim in the order of preference is the letter your certificate has to prove, so a death certificate belongs to categories A and C, a disability certificate to B and D, and a gallantry award certificate to E, while the pension payment order or discharge book runs across A to F. Claim a rung you cannot certify and the application is marked defective at force level.

Everyone files the same academic proof: an attested copy of the MEQ mark sheet, plus a bonafide certificate from the institute. Where the parent is still serving, the service certificate has to come from the Head of Office on the scheme's own Annexure-A proforma, which is why families are told to start with the unit welfare office rather than the college.

Aadhaar sits underneath all of it. Applicants who have reached the age of 18 on the date of registration need their own Aadhaar; a younger applicant may register on an Aadhaar Enrolment ID or on a parent or legal guardian's Aadhaar, and has to complete Aadhaar based eKYC on reaching that age for the scholarship to continue.

Step by step

How to apply

The application is entirely online on NSP and there is nothing to post. After the one time registration step that NSP now requires of every scholarship applicant, log in as a student, pick Ministry of Home Affairs from the scheme list and select Prime Minister's Scholarship Scheme For Central Armed Police Forces And Assam Rifles rather than the States and UTs Police scheme sitting directly above it, then upload the category certificate and the MEQ mark sheet.

Your file then moves through three desks and you cannot skip any of them: the college or university verifies the academic claim, the CAPF, Assam Rifles or State nodal officer verifies the service claim and the category, and the Welfare and Rehabilitation Board pools the cleared applications from all the forces before NSP builds the merit list from them. If you realise you have filed against the wrong scheme or the wrong category, you can withdraw the application up to the closure of that second level verification, choosing a reason from a standard drop down, and file again while the portal is still open.

The form and the money answer to different systems, so the first thing to settle is which of the two has gone quiet. Application status is read on NSP itself, by logging in with the registration number and password issued when you submitted, and the portal sends a system generated SMS to the registered mobile number at submission and again on selection. The money is tracked separately on the Public Financial Management System through its Know Your Payment page, because the credit is a DBT transfer into the Aadhaar seeded account rather than a payout from the scholarship portal. If a transfer is failing, the thing to check first is Aadhaar seeding status, which NSP links from its own home page, not the application status.

A family posted somewhere the connection is unreliable can have the whole thing done at a Common Service Centre instead of at home, and the portal caps what that costs at Rs 30.00 per candidate, taxes included.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Selection is a sort, not a committee. Fresh applications are ordered first by category letter, then by percentage in MEQ, then by the age of the candidate with the higher age preferred, and finally by the rank of the parent with the lower rank preferred, as the scheme FAQ sets out. The last two rules only ever act as tie breakers between applicants sitting on the same rung with the same MEQ percentage, and nothing in the sort lets a lower rung overtake a higher one on marks alone.

Category G, the wards of serving personnel below officer rank, is the only rung the guidelines qualify with the words subject to availability of scholarship. That is the plain reading of the ration: the six rungs above it are filled first, and a serving family's application competes for whatever the fixed pool still holds.

There is no state or force quota inside the scheme, so an applicant from a large force is not competing against a set-aside for a smaller one. Once verification closes, the merit list is generated on NSP, the Welfare and Rehabilitation Board calculates the amount and raises the fund requisition to the Ministry of Home Affairs, and PFMS credits the selected accounts.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The scholarship is admissible for only two children per family, and the obligation to police that sits on the beneficiaries and on the force, not on the portal. Marital status is irrelevant to eligibility, which matters for the widows the scheme was written for.

Accuracy is treated as the applicant's own responsibility rather than the verifier's. Nothing in the three-desk verification chain shifts that: a claim cleared by the college, the force and WARB is still the student's own claim, and if it later turns out to be false or to have hidden something the candidature falls at whatever stage that surfaces, with the money repayable in full and with interest. On admissibility disputes, the guidelines make the decision of the Joint Secretary (Police-II) final.

Get help

Contact

Wards of deceased, retired and serving CAPF and Assam Rifles personnel are directed to the Welfare and Rehabilitation Board at the Ministry of Home Affairs, on 011-23063111 or secywarb-mha@nic.in. Service and category queries are better taken to your own force first: the guidelines carry a force wise list of branch contact numbers for exactly this, and it is the force nodal officer, not WARB, who verifies the category you claim. Portal faults, failed face authentication and login problems go to the NSP helpdesk instead.

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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