Research and Development Programme in Water Sector(RDPWS)

Overview

About RDPWS

This grant pays an institution. The applicant is a Principal Investigator on the rolls of a university, an IIT, a government laboratory or a registered Indian society, and the sanctioned money is transferred to that institution's account against a research proposal the department has cleared. A student meets the scheme from the other side, as a Junior Research Fellow, Senior Research Fellow or Research Associate hired on a project that has already been approved.

The rulebook has also moved, and that is the first thing to establish. A proposal filed today is read against the Guidelines for Implementation of R&D Programme (Sponsoring and Coordinating Research in Water Sector), April 2025, which the R&D Division issued in supersession of the April 2019 edition. The Central Water Commission says the same thing from the receiving end: its research page tells investigators that proposals funded under the programme are to be formulated, submitted and implemented as per the 2025 guidelines. Most descriptions of this programme still in circulation, including the scheme record reproduced further down the page, are written from the 2019 text, so where the two differ the 2025 document is the one that governs. The nodal body's name moved with it, from the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation to the Department of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation under the Ministry of Jal Shakti.

The programme is not a standalone scheme. It is the sub-component "Sponsoring and Coordinating Research in Water Sector" inside the departmental scheme "Research and Development Programme in Water Sector and Implementation of National Water Mission", and the April 2025 guidelines run it through the Fifteenth Finance Commission period and the plans that follow. Research is routed through three Indian National Committees, on Surface Water, on Ground Water and on Climate Change, with a Technical Evaluation Committee added for proof-of-concept and pilot proposals from startups, MSMEs and industry.

The scheme is live and the money behind it is rising. One budget line covers research and development together with implementation of the National Water Mission, and the departmental Notes on Demands for Grants put it at Rs 42.11 crore actual in 2024-25, Rs 70 crore at budget stage for 2025-26, Rs 120.61 crore at revised estimate, and Rs 243.48 crore for 2026-27. Because the National Water Mission shares that line, none of those figures is the research programme's own allocation; what they show is the direction of the head an approved proposal is paid from.

Approvals are happening. The department's Annual Report 2024-25 records that 13 new research schemes were recommended by the Standing Advisory Committee and approved by Secretary (Water Resources) during the year, and names completed projects on irrigation efficiency through on-farm water management, dynamic downscaling of climate change impacts, and a hydrogeological assessment of depleting water resources in Uttarakhand's tourist towns.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

There is no application deadline. The dates that matter arrive after sanction, and missing one stalls the next release rather than ending the project.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Read the 2025 list of who can be funded before anything else, because it is narrower at the top and wider at the bottom than the older one. The April 2025 guidelines list, in order: institutes of national importance ranked in the top 50 on NIRF, THE or QS, and incubators; research and development institutes or laboratories of the central or state government; organisations under the department; Indian NGOs registered under the relevant Society Act and non-profit Indian private research bodies registered with the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research; and startups, MSMEs, industry and academia proposing proof of concept, pilots or a commercial product. The Standing Advisory Committee may add to that list.

The opening paragraph of the same document still describes the assistance in the old broad way, as grants to academicians and experts in universities, IITs, recognised research laboratories, water resources and irrigation departments of the central and state governments, and NGOs. Both statements sit in the April 2025 text, and the narrower one is the operative one: the first thing a committee secretariat does with a new file is check that it adheres to these guidelines, and the funding list is part of them. A proposal from an unranked private college is arguing against that list rather than from it.

Two limits apply to the person, not the institution. Only one research proposal is considered at a time from one Principal Investigator, and a fresh proposal is taken up only after that investigator's previous departmental project is complete. Associating a Co-Principal Investigator is described as desirable rather than mandatory, and it matters later: if the PI leaves, the Co-PI is expected to carry the project to completion before the institution can relieve the PI.

A research-staff position is a separate question from the grant, and the guidelines do not fix its rate in their own text. They annex the Department of Science and Technology order dated 26.06.2023 and say emoluments for a JRF, SRF or Research Associate follow that order and its subsequent revisions. Any fixed fellowship figure quoted for this scheme is therefore a snapshot of whichever DST order was current when it was written.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

Two different exclusions run through the guidelines, and they bite at different moments. One is a list of items no grant will pay for: foreign travel, the salary of the PI or any regular employee of the institute, honorarium or cash incentives of any kind for investigators and research staff, and construction, maintenance or repair of buildings, vehicles and air conditioners. The April 2025 text adds a catch-all, that anything the Standing Advisory Committee disallows is out. Getting one of these into a budget does not sink the file so much as get the line struck out of the sanctioned estimate.

The other exclusion is the one that decides proposals. Work that investigates no new technique, that is mostly data collection and the application of known methods to that data, or where the end user of the result is not clearly identified, is discouraged under the 2025 wording and was flatly outside consideration under the 2019 version. Duplication is screened independently: the INC writes to DST, DSIR and CSIR, the Ministry of Earth Sciences, the environment ministry and the agriculture ministry for their views, and for climate proposals to the relevant missions under the National Action Plan on Climate Change. An INC also cannot fund a proposal in which one of its own members is the Principal Investigator.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

What repeats in a sanctioned project is the release cycle, not the award. The duration is fixed at sanction, and each further instalment inside it turns on the annual progress report, the utilisation certificate and the equipment statement filed for the previous year. There is no re-application and no annual renewal decision.

What comes closest to renewal is a time extension, and the 2025 rules tightened it. An extension is always without additional money, is granted initially up to 50% of the original project period, and beyond that only in exceptional circumstances decided case by case, per the April 2025 guidelines. The request has to reach the committee at least six months before the sanctioned completion date, with reasons for the delay. The older 2019 guidelines allowed a total extension of up to two years, which is the figure still quoted in most descriptions of this scheme.

What you get

Award & benefits

Grant-in-aid is built from four expenditure heads: research manpower, travel, infrastructure and equipment, and experimental charges. Contingency and overhead charges sit outside those four. Contingency is a budget provision only, capped at 5% of the four heads or Rs 1.00 lakh, whichever is less, and it never appears in the expenditure statement, as the April 2025 guidelines set out. That ceiling is one lakh, not one crore, in both the 2019 and the 2025 text.

Overhead charges follow the DST norms dated 24.2.2015 that the 2025 guidelines adopt in full, and the slabs go well past the first one:

Two conditions blunt that. Private institutions and universities get no overhead charge at all, and overheads for everyone else are paid only after the scheme is complete and the final report accepted, so they cannot be spent during the project.

The 2025 edition also opened two doors the older one did not have. The department will now fund hackathons on priority water issues and give winners an initial Rs 1 lakh to develop a detailed proof-of-concept proposal, and it will fund pilots, prototypes and commercial products up to TRL7/8.

Research manpower is the head most people want a number for, and the rate is set by the DST order the guidelines annex rather than by the scheme. The revision currently in force reads as follows.

• The scheme provides Grants-in-Aid for Basic Research, Applied Research, and Action Research.
• The scheme provides remuneration and emoluments for research personnel assisting the investigators.
• The revised monthly emoluments are ₹25,000/- for a Junior Research Fellow, ₹28,000/- for a Senior Research Fellow, and ₹36,000/- to ₹40,000/- for Research Associates across different levels.
• The grant funds the cost of conducting experiments, including consumables, wages for full-time non-research personnel, and third-party services like typing and lab analysis.
• The grant provides travel expenses connected with the research, including one long-distance journey by one person once a year for attending a research and development session or committee meeting.
• The scheme provides infrastructure funding for the purchase of equipment of a permanent nature, software, and necessary meteorological or satellite data.
• The scheme provides overhead charges to the host institute for facilities like infrastructure, staff, water, electricity, and communication.
• For projects costing up to ₹1,00,00,000/-, overhead charges are provided at 10% of the total cost for educational institutions and Non-Governmental Organizations, and at 8% for laboratories and institutions under Central Government Departments.
• The scheme provides a contingency budget provision up to 5% of the total cost or ₹1,00,00,000/- (whichever is less) for unforeseen situations.
• Funds are provided by direct transfer of money into the bank account of the appropriate authority in the institute.
• The funds are released in installments commensurate with the progress of the work and actual requirements during the financial year.
• The beneficiary institute must provide full infrastructural facilities by way of accommodation, water, electricity, and communication for the smooth implementation of the project.
• Non-Governmental Organizations and Private Institutions must bear 50% of the equipment cost from their own resources.
• The overhead expenses shall actually be paid to the institute by the Ministry Of Water Resources only after the completion of the research scheme and the acceptance of the final report.
• The Principal Investigator must submit an annual progress report indicating milestones achieved and a utilization certificate to the concerned Indian National Committee on or before the 30th of June every year to receive further installments.
• The Principal Investigator must refund any unspent balance or unused funds along with interest accrued to the Pay and Accounts Office via a crossed demand draft after the completion of the scheme.

What to prepare

Documents required

The paperwork list is long, so the useful thing is knowing which items actually stop a file. Certificates from two end users are one of them, because the guidelines treat an unidentified end user as a reason to set the proposal aside, and the certificate is the only proof the department accepts that someone intends to use the result.

Proforma invoices are another. The 2019 rules exempted minor items costing up to Rs 1000 from needing a quotation; the 2025 text asks for proforma invoices or budgetary quotations for all items, with the invoices enclosed. The bio-data annexure is heavier than it looks as well: it asks the PI to declare every sponsored project completed, in hand, foreclosed with reasons, and currently submitted elsewhere for sanction, which is how the one-project-at-a-time rule gets enforced.

NGOs carry a separate stack. A bond with two sureties to the President of India is required before any grant is released, the sureties must hold fixed deposits or assets larger than the grant, and the bond runs for 365 days beyond the scheduled completion date and has to be extended before any time extension is granted, per the April 2025 guidelines.

Step by step

How to apply

Submission is offline and there is no application portal. Five printed copies of the proposal in the prescribed proforma, plus a soft copy in PDF or Word, go to the concerned Indian National Committee, recommended by the head of the institution. If it is unclear which committee owns the subject, the file can go to the R&D Division instead, which forwards it. Proposals may be sent at any time during the year; there is no annual window.

The routing depends on the subject. Surface water hydrology, floods, irrigation, drainage, hydraulic structures, river morphology and remote sensing applications go to the Indian National Committee on Surface Water, whose secretariat is the WS&RS Directorate at the Central Water Commission in R.K. Puram, New Delhi. Recharge, groundwater quality, aquifer modelling and geophysical investigation go to the Indian National Committee on Ground Water at Bhujal Bhawan, Faridabad. Downscaling, climate impact assessment and adaptation studies go to the Indian National Committee on Climate Change at the National Institute of Hydrology, Roorkee.

What a PI has to quote afterwards is an identification number, and the committee secretariat allots it only once the file has cleared the first look for domain fit, guidelines compliance and complete annexures. Everything asked of the secretariat after that is asked against that number. A file that fails the first look is not rejected; it comes back with the committee's observations and can be revised and resubmitted. The guidelines put an internal clock on what follows, requiring the whole examination and evaluation to finish inside six months.

The money runs on a fixed annual rhythm rather than on request, and the April 2025 guidelines set every point on it. The first instalment moves only after the signed acceptance of the terms and conditions, endorsed by the head of the institution, reaches the subject matter division, and it covers 30% of manpower, travel and experimental charges plus 100% of the admissible equipment amount for that financial year. Every later release needs the annual progress report as on 31st March, filed with the committee on or before 30th June, together with the utilisation certificate in Form GFR 19-A and the statement of equipment purchased. Unspent money from the previous year has to be revalidated separately, and that request must reach the committee by 15th April, where the 2019 rules had allowed until 30th June. One caution on that date: the 2025 terms and conditions appendix still prints 30th April for the same request, so a PI who files by 15th April satisfies both readings. The final instalment, including overheads, is released only after the final report is accepted.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Screening comes first and is administrative. The secretariat checks that the topic sits in the committee's subject domain, that the guidelines have been followed, and that the annexures and certificates are all there.

Peer review follows. The soft copy goes to two or three external reviewers and to all committee members for their views. Comments are consolidated and sent to the PI in one go rather than piecemeal, and the source of each comment is kept confidential. The PI may be asked to submit a revised proposal incorporating them, and may be invited to present the work to the committee before it decides whether to recommend.

Approval sits above the committee. Recommended proposals go to the R&D Division, which puts them before the Standing Advisory Committee in Water Sector, chaired by the Additional Secretary and Mission Director of the National Water Mission, with the Joint Secretary (NWM), the Joint Secretary and Financial Adviser, a domain expert from the Central Water Commission or the Central Ground Water Board, and the Director of the R&D Division as member secretary. That committee also decides the quantum and the milestones of payment, so the sanctioned amount can differ from the amount sought.

Proposals from startups, MSMEs, industry and academia for proof of concept, pilots or commercial products take a second route, through a Technical Evaluation Committee constituted by the Standing Advisory Committee. It is chaired by the Joint Secretary (NWM) and includes a domain expert from CWC or CGWB, an IT expert with AI, IoT or decision-support knowledge from the Department of Telecommunications, a representative of the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation, and the Director of NIH Roorkee as member secretary. It recommends project duration and the key performance indicators used to monitor the work, and no expert from the applicant's own institution may sit on it.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

Everything bought with the grant belongs to the Government of India. Assets cannot be sold, encumbered or used for another purpose without prior sanction, and at the end of the project the department is free to sell them, gift them to the institution or transfer them elsewhere.

Intellectual property splits ownership from credit. The Principal Investigator is recognised as the inventor, but the title to any patent, copyright or other intellectual property vests in the Government of India. Permission from the committee is needed before filing a patent or commercially exploiting a result, and the committee then signs an agreement with the PI covering sale of know-how and the ratio in which royalty or premium is shared. Publication needs prior approval, results that are to be legally protected must not be published before that protection exists, and the department's assistance has to be acknowledged. Collaborating with a foreign party on the results also needs approval first.

Money left over does not stay with the institution. Interest or other earnings on the grant must be refunded to the Consolidated Fund of India year on year or at completion, and cannot be adjusted against future releases. The 2019 rules had instead asked for a crossed demand draft to the Pay and Accounts Office at the end.

The NGO conditions are stricter than the general ones, and the April 2025 appendix for NGOs spells them out. An NGO must be registered under the Societies Registration Act or the Charitable Trusts Act, must have been in operation for at least three years after registration, must submit audited accounts and income tax returns for the previous three financial years, must file an affidavit that it has not been blacklisted, and may pay its own personnel no more than Rs 25,000 per annum from the grant. Equipment expenditure is to be kept to an absolute minimum. That appendix also bars funding to a private company registered under the Companies Act, which applies to the NGO route it governs and is why a for-profit entity has to come through the proof-of-concept and pilot channel described above rather than dress itself as a society.

Get help

Contact

The R&D Division, Department of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation, Ministry of Jal Shakti, sits at Wing-4, West Block-1, R.K. Puram, New Delhi 110066, on 011-29583482, at watrnd-mowr@nic.in, as listed in the April 2025 guidelines.

Proposals go to the committee secretariats: incsw-cwc@gov.in for surface water, msincgw-cgwb@nic.in for ground water, and inccc.nih@gmail.com for climate change. Two of those three email IDs are new in the April 2025 edition, so an address copied from an older description of this scheme can send a proposal to a desk that no longer handles it. The department also keeps a page on the Research and Development Programme in Water Sector describing the scheme's sub-components.

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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