Rajbhasha Gaurav Puraskar Scheme for writing original book in Hindi(RGPSWOBH)

Overview

About RGPSWOBH

The entry ticket here is a book that already exists. It has to be printed, carry an ISBN and clear a minimum length before the Department of Official Language will look at it. Rajbhasha Gaurav Puraskar sits under Education and Learning on the government's scheme portal, which is how students keep landing on it, but no part of it pays for study. It pays an author after the fact, once a committee of outside scholars has read the book.

Picture the entrant the Department has in mind: a serving police officer who has written a criminology monograph in Hindi, a conservation architect on temple heritage, a physician or an engineer putting a technical field into Hindi for readers with no English text to fall back on, a translator carrying a classic across. Each of them has a printed book on the shelf before they have anything to send. Publication inside the qualifying calendar year is the gate, not the writing, and a manuscript has no route in.

The scheme is also wider now than the version most search results still describe. The Department has implemented a revised Rajbhasha Gaurav Award Scheme for original books written in Hindi and books translated into Hindi, effective from the year 2025-26, and it awards citizens of India in five categories: engineering and science subjects, law and police research with forensic science and criminology, culture and religion and arts and heritage, original writing by an author of the 'C' region, and books translated into Hindi (Annual Programme, Department of Official Language). The revision arrived as a fresh resolution for publication in the Gazette of India, superseding the Department's own earlier resolution on this award (Rajbhasha Gaurav Puraskar Yojna resolution).

Parts of the scheme record on the government portal were written for the older shape and have not caught up. Its general conditions still say translated books are not accepted, which holds for the four original-writing categories and no longer holds for the scheme as a whole: translation is now a category of its own, with its own conditions, its own exclusions and its own prize money.

The award was itself an amalgamation. It began as a Gazette resolution introducing the scheme from the financial year 2015-16, in supersession of resolutions dated the 30th July, 1986 and the 8th August, 2005 and an office memorandum of 2013 that had run a separate prize for excellent articles (Resolution 11034/48/2014-OL (Policy), Gazette of India Part 1 Section 1). Two things about it have moved since, and an author comparing the current call against an older one will notice both.

So a thin monograph that would have failed the middle rounds can qualify again, and a book published in a year the round does not cover is out however good it is, with no carry forward to the next call.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

The round is named for the year the book was published, and everything else happens in the year after it. That gap is the single most common reason an author misses a cycle. The Department opens each round with an office memorandum that names the publication window and fixes the last date for entries to reach it, and the memorandum for the current round is on the Department's site (the Department's office memorandum for the current round). Read the date off that document rather than off any republished summary.

Two practical readings come out of that pattern. The call has consistently gone out in the first quarter of the year following publication and closed in the spring, which leaves an author roughly ten weeks between seeing the notification and posting a parcel; the current memorandum stretches that window to the end of May rather than closing it at the start. And the translation category runs on a different clock in its first outing, accepting books published or translated across two calendar years instead of one before it narrows to a single year like the rest (the Department's office memorandum for the current round). An author who wants that window should have the copies and the ISBN details ready before the notification appears, not after.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Citizenship and subject are the only two tests the scheme applies to the person: any citizen of India may enter, and the book has to sit in one of the listed subject groups. Everything else it tests belongs to the book.

The one category with a genuine personal test is the 'C' region award, and it is stricter than the geography suggests. The author's mother tongue must not be Hindi, and the author must have completed schooling in the relevant Region 'C' state, with copies of the Class 10 and Class 12 certificates asked for as proof. The Department lists Region 'C' as all eight North-Eastern states together with Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Goa, Jammu and Kashmir, Odisha, Lakshadweep, Pondicherry and West Bengal (Rajbhasha Gaurav Puraskar Yojna resolution). A Hindi speaker living in Kochi does not qualify for it. A Malayali who finished school in Kerala and then wrote in Hindi does.

The translation category draws its boundary around the source work rather than the translator. It takes Hindi translations of books and works by famous authors, scholars and personalities on culture, art and heritage that have been awarded at national or international level, so a competent translation of an unrecognised original does not qualify however well it reads.

One older route has quietly closed. Until recent rounds the Department ran a second award reserved for serving and retired officers and employees of central government ministries, undertakings, nationalised banks and central universities, with a serving author's entry routed through the head of the department and a retired author's sent directly with a copy of the pension payment order; the call for the year 2020 round, published on 24 February 2021, still carried it (Press Information Bureau). No such category survives in the five the revised scheme created, so a government servant now enters on the same footing as any other citizen.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

The scheme publishes no separate exclusion list, so the disqualifications sit inside the general conditions, and they are unusually specific about form.

Genre is the first filter. Research work for a PhD, poetry, a novel, a story, a drama and anything written as a textbook are all outside the scheme; what it asks for is content that is critical and analytical. The translation category adds a longer list of its own, ruling out translated departmental manuals, biographies, character sketches, reportage, travelogues and memoirs on top of the same literary forms.

Prior recognition is the second filter. A book already awarded by any government organisation is not eligible, and if a book picks up another award after entry but before these results are declared, the author or translator has to inform the Department immediately.

The third filter catches the author rather than the book, and the two current documents word it differently. The resolution bars anyone who has taken a prize under any scheme of the Department of Official Language in the preceding three years; the memorandum that opened the current round words the same bar as a prize under the Department's original book writing scheme (Rajbhasha Gaurav Puraskar Yojna resolution, the Department's office memorandum for the current round). Either way a co-author who is clear of the bar may still enter, and is then paid a proportionate share.

Absent an ISBN, an entry does not enter at all.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

There is no second year to claim. A prize is paid once on one book, and the only rule that reaches forward is the three-year bar described above, which pushes the author's next eligible entry out rather than renewing anything.

What you get

Award & benefits

The five categories are not worth the same amount, and they do not carry the same number of prizes, which is worth knowing before a book that could sit in two of them is placed in one.

The engineering and science category is the oldest and remains the richest. It is the only one that carries a third prize, at Rs 75,000, and the only one with three incentive awards rather than two; its first and second prizes are Rs 2,00,000 and Rs 1,25,000. Each of the other four categories, law and police research, culture and heritage, 'C' region authorship and translation, runs a first prize of Rs 1,50,000, a second of Rs 1,00,000 and two incentive awards. Every incentive award in every category is Rs 40,000, and each prize and incentive carries a certificate and a memento with it (Annual Programme, Department of Official Language).

None of those prize figures is a promise that the money will be handed out. If the evaluation committee concludes that none of the books it received deserves an award, it can give none, and that decision is final. A category is not obliged to produce a winner in a given year.

• Award Scheme Summary: A. Rajbhasha Gaurav Puraskar writing original book in Hindi on Engineering, Electronics, Computer Science, Physics, Biology, Energy, Space Science, Medicine, Chemistry, Information Technology, Management, Psychology and contemporary topics like Liberalisation, Globalization, Consumerism, Human Rights, Pollution:
• First Prize: ₹2,00,000/-, a certificate and a memento
• Second Prize: ₹1,25,000/-, a certificate and a memento
• Third Prize: ₹75,000/-, a certificate and a memento
• Incentive Award (Three): ₹40,000/-, an incentive certificate, and a memento
• B. Rajbhasha Gaurav Puraskar for writing original books in Hindi on the subjects of Law and Police Research, Forensic Science, criminology and police administration etc.:
• First Prize: ₹1,50,000/-, a certificate and a memento
• Second Prize: ₹1,00,000/-, a certificate and a memento
• Incentive Award (Two): ₹40,000/-, an incentive certificate, and a memento
• C. Rajbhasha Gaurav Puraskar for writing original book in Hindi on subjects related to Culture, Religion, Arts and Heritage:
• First Prize: ₹1,50,000/-, a certificate and a memento
• Second Prize: ₹1,00,000/-, a certificate and a memento
• Incentive Award (Two): 40,000/-, an incentive certificate, and a memento
• D. Rajbhasha Gaurav Puraskar for writing original books in Hindi by the author of 'C' region (on the subjects of all the above categories).
• First Prize: ₹1,50,000/-, a certificate and a memento
• Second Prize: ₹1,00,000/-, a certificate and a memento
• Incentive Award (Two): ₹40,000/-, an incentive certificate, and a memento
• D. Rajbhasha Gaurav Puraskar for books translated in Hindi - For translated books on classics and subjects related to culture, art, heritage.
• First Prize: ₹1,50,000/-, a certificate and a memento
• Second Prize: ₹1,00,000/-, a certificate and a memento
• Incentive Award (Two): ₹40,000/-, an incentive certificate, and a memento
• Note 01: Copyright on the award-winning book will remain with the Authors/Publishers.
• Note 02: Awardees coming from places other than the place fixed for distribution of the award will be given to and fro fare for 2nd AC and daily allowance as per rules of the Government of India. Arrangements for lodging will be made by him/her at his/her own expense.

What to prepare

Documents required

The proforma decides whether an entry is opened or returned. It is printed in the annexure to the notification, it has to be completed in full, and without it no entry is entertained. Each co-author or co-translator fills a separate proforma for the same book rather than signing one between them.

Copies of the book come next, and the count is the one place where the Department's two current documents disagree. The resolution asks for three copies with each entry; the memorandum that opened the current round asks for four, and requires four copies of the original-language book as well from anyone entering the translation category (Rajbhasha Gaurav Puraskar Yojna resolution, the Department's office memorandum for the current round). Read the count off the memorandum for the round being entered, take the higher figure if the two are ever ambiguous, and treat every copy sent as spent: none of them are returned.

An author entering the 'C' region category adds the school certificates named under Eligibility. The identity and contact details the record lists are collected inside the proforma itself.

Step by step

How to apply

This is an offline scheme with a postal address and no application portal. The author assembles the entry, fills the proforma, packs the copies of the book with it and posts the parcel to the Department of Official Language in New Delhi so that it arrives before the last date fixed for that round. An author or translator may send only one entry, into one scheme, so a book that could arguably belong in two categories has to be placed in one of them deliberately.

Then comes the part that surprises most entrants: there is nothing to follow up. The Department writes to the awardees and puts the decision on its own website, and it will not entertain correspondence about the conferment of an award or about how a book was selected (Rajbhasha Gaurav Puraskar Yojna resolution). Nothing is issued to acknowledge an entry, no application number is generated to quote back, and silence carries no information at all: an author who hears nothing is in exactly the same position as every entrant who was read closely and not chosen. Payment follows the award, and the ceremony date is fixed by the Department rather than announced with the call.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Books are read and ranked by a committee the Department constitutes for the purpose, against criteria the Department sets. The Joint Secretary of the Department of Official Language chairs it, two non-official persons nominated by the Department each year sit as members, and a Director or Deputy Director (Implementation) or an equivalent officer nominated by the Department is member-secretary. The current resolution adds a provision the older one did not carry: an official from the ministry or department concerned with the subject may be brought onto the committee to help evaluate the entries (Rajbhasha Gaurav Puraskar Yojna resolution).

Four features of that design are worth an author's attention. The next of kin of anyone who has sent an entry cannot sit on the committee. The committee may take advice from specialists in the subject before deciding on a book, and those experts draw an honorarium fixed by the Department. The committee determines its own assessment criteria, which is why no marking scheme appears anywhere in the scheme papers. And where the members cannot agree the award is settled by majority, with the chairperson holding a casting vote if the votes are level, after which the Department takes its decision on the committee's recommendations.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

Two conditions shape what a win is actually worth. Where a selected book has more than one author the prize money is divided equally among them, which is a different rule from the proportionate share a co-author receives when the lead author is sitting out the three-year bar. And copyright in an award-winning book stays where it was, with the authors, publishers and translators rather than with the Department (Rajbhasha Gaurav Puraskar Yojna resolution).

The travel entitlement for an awardee has widened. The Gazette resolution that introduced the scheme offered to and fro second AC rail fare with a daily allowance at government rates, lodging at the awardee's own cost (Resolution 11034/48/2014-OL (Policy)); an awardee travelling to the ceremony under the current rules may take economy class air fare instead of the rail entitlement, with the daily allowance and the lodging rule unchanged (Rajbhasha Gaurav Puraskar Yojna resolution).

Two further clauses are worth reading before the book goes to press. Responsibility for the contents stays with the author or translator, who has to stand behind the facts and figures printed in the book and give references as proof wherever possible, which is a real editorial condition in the technical and legal categories rather than a formality. And the central government keeps a right to relax: where it considers it necessary or expedient, and records its reasons in writing, it may by order relax any provision of the resolution.

Get help

Contact

Entries and queries go to the Implementation-2 section of the Department of Official Language, Ministry of Home Affairs, in the B-wing on the 4th floor of NDCC Building-II, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001 (Manual 15, Department of Official Language). The Department has run its award correspondence from that address across rounds, and the memorandum for the current round prints the room number and the section's telephone numbers alongside it (the Department's office memorandum for the current round). Remember that the no-correspondence rule covers the selection itself: the desk answers questions about the form and the posting, not about how a book was judged.

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