Research Grant For In-Service Faculty Members(RGISFM)

Overview

About RGISFM

A student who lands here should keep looking. The Research Grant for In-Service Faculty Members pays a serving college or university teacher to run a research project, and the University Grants Commission sets the door at an age of up to 50 years with a minimum of 10 years of service still left in the university, on its scheme page for the grant. The award there is Rs 10 lakh over a tenure of two years, across 200 slots.

This is a project grant for someone who already holds a permanent academic post, which is why no salary component sits inside it. The recipient is drawing a pay scale from the institution that employs them; what UGC adds is the cost of doing the research.

The Commission lists it on its Faculty Corner as one of three research awards written for teachers, separated by where a career has reached rather than by discipline. Of those three it has the widest opening and the tightest entry. The scheme page sets 200 slots against it, where the fellowship for superannuated faculty at the far end of the same list carries 100 per annum. More places, fewer people permitted to stand for them, is the shape of this one.

Almost nothing that binds an applicant is on that scheme page. It summarises the award in a handful of fields and still files it under the remark "Newly launched scheme", while the conditions that decide an application sit in the scheme guidelines the Commission dated 2022. The referee stage, the deadline that starts once an award letter is issued, and the certificates that unlock each instalment are all written there and nowhere else.

Nothing about the award reaches a personal bank account. The sanction is made in the institution's name, the institution draws and accounts for the instalments, and equipment bought under the grant stays on the institution's books after the work ends.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

UGC has never attached a window to this grant. The scheme page publishes no calendar against it, and the scheme's own record leaves both the opening and the closing field empty, which means the only dates that ever bind are the ones printed on an invitation when the Commission issues one, on its site and on the fellowship and research grant portal.

One deadline is published, and it falls after the award rather than before it. An award letter starts a three-month clock, and a grant left unjoined and unactivated when it expires is simply treated as cancelled. Nobody below the competent authority can move that date, and even with its approval, granted only in special circumstances, the outside limit is six months from the letter, per the scheme guidelines. Stretching it buys nothing on the project itself, since the two years of tenure begin at the first instalment rather than at the letter.

Two more limits run regardless of any notification, and both are personal rather than administrative: the birthday that carries an applicant past 50, and the point at which fewer than 10 years of service remain. Neither is advertised by anyone.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Every condition here looks backwards. UGC is not asking what an applicant intends to do with a decade of research life; it is asking what has already finished, and a strong proposal cannot substitute for any part of that record.

The age cap and the service floor squeeze from opposite directions, and they are the pair that disqualifies most people who read this far. A teacher has to have carried 5 doctoral candidates to completion and closed 2 funded projects, which takes years, yet still be short of 50 with a decade of service ahead. That window opens later than an early-career grant and closes earlier than most academics expect.

The employer test is worth reading separately, because it can move without the applicant doing anything. Accreditation is written into the university and deemed university routes, so a teacher at either one is eligible only while that accreditation is valid, and a lapsed or pending NAAC cycle at the institution closes the door on staff who had no part in it. The two remaining routes, government-funded degree-awarding institutions and Institutions of National Importance, are admitted on their status alone and carry no such exposure.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

The exclusions published for this scheme are about losing the grant rather than never getting it, so the bars on entry live in the eligibility conditions and the bars on spending live in the award terms.

On entry, the conditions are independent rather than cumulative. Crossing 50 ends it whatever the publication record shows, and a decade of service ahead counts for nothing if the supervision and project history is not already there.

On spending, the bar that shapes a proposal most is the one on people. This grant may not be used to appoint a project assistant or a research fellow, and that deserves a moment, because the applicant has just been asked to prove they can carry doctoral candidates to completion and is then funded on terms that forbid paying anybody to work on the project. Whatever labour the work needs has to come from people the department is already paying. The two remaining bars, on furniture and on travel outside India, constrain the budget rather than the design of the research.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Nothing here is renewable, and the guidelines close the question rather than leave it open. The funded period is capped at two years counted from the first instalment, with no provision anywhere to lengthen it. Once that period runs out the grant lapses at once, and spending charged against it after that date has no legal standing at all, per the scheme guidelines.

Read that as a scoping instruction rather than a warning. There is no mechanism in this scheme for buying time, so a project designed to need a third year has no route to one, and work still running when the tenure ends has to be finished on the institution's money or not at all. The clock is also generous at the front, since it starts when the first instalment is released and not when the award letter is signed, which means a slow release costs the researcher nothing and a slow finish costs everything.

What you get

Award & benefits

Rs 10 lakh is the whole of it, spread across a tenure of two years and 200 sanctioned slots, as UGC states on its scheme page. Nothing is paid monthly, and no separate contingency grant runs alongside the ceiling the way the Commission attaches Rs 50,000 a year in contingency to its fellowship for superannuated faculty.

Within that ceiling the split across minor equipment, consumables, contingencies, fieldwork and travel is the awardee's own call, decided against what the work actually needs. That latitude matters more here than it would elsewhere, because with no salary line and no paid assistant permitted, the entire sum is a materials and fieldwork budget for one researcher's own hands. Nobody at the Commission is second-guessing the proportions.

Release comes in three parts and each is unlocked by a document rather than by a date, per the guidelines: 50% once the joining report reaches UGC, 25% against the utilisation certificate for that first tranche, and the closing 25% on a reimbursement basis against claims plus the utilisation certificate for the second. Half the money therefore lands before any research has been reported on, and the other half is gated entirely on the institution's finance section turning certificates around.

• Slots: 200 or as may be decided by the Commission
• Financial Assistance: The quantum of support under the scheme is ₹ 10,00,000.
• The grant can be utilized for purchasing items like minor equipment, consumables, contingencies, fieldwork, travel, etc.
• The grant cannot be used for international travel, purchasing furniture items, or for appointing a project assistant or research fellow.
• The quantum of funds under these heads can be decided by the recipient depending on his / her needs.
• The items/equipment purchased from this grant shall be the property of the University.
• Release of Grants: The grant will be released in 3 installments to the university.
• Initially, 50% of the grant will be released on receipt of the joining report (Annexure-I). 1. The next installment of 25% of the research grant shall be paid on submission of the utilization certificate (_Annexure-II_) of the first installment. 1. The final installment of 25% of the research grant shall be released on a reimbursement basis on submitting the claims and utilization certificate of the second installment.
• However, the tenure to utilize the whole grant shall be 2 years from the release of the first installment of the research grant.

What to prepare

Documents required

The checklist published alongside this grant is UGC's general instruction sheet, written once for every scheme the fellowship and research grant portal carries. Items belonging to other schemes on that portal appear on it, so read each line against this grant's own conditions before assuming it applies to you.

One item cannot be produced alone. The portal generates a form from what has been filled in, and that form has to be printed, signed by the head of department or the registrar, and uploaded before the submission completes. The final step of the application therefore depends on another person being in office, which is where applications left to the last day of a window are lost.

Three further papers sit in the guidelines rather than in the application, and they arrive later. The institution signs an undertaking confirming that the applicant is permanent faculty of the department, stating the date of retirement or superannuation, and promising laboratory space and infrastructure for the sanctioned period. Read what that date is doing: it is how the 10-year service condition is actually policed, by the registrar's signature rather than by the applicant's own arithmetic. The other two are the joining report that releases the first instalment and the utilisation certificate that releases the next, both of which need the head of department and the head of institution alongside the awardee.

After submission, the research proposal and its abstract are the documents that carry any weight. The rest of the set establishes who you are and where you work.

Step by step

How to apply

Applications exist only when UGC invites them, and only online. There is no offline route and no rolling window: the Commission's notification creates the application period, and outside it the form is not on the portal at all.

The sequence is registration on UGC's fellowship and research grant portal, then the profile and eligibility details, then the postgraduate and doctoral record, then the proposal, then the signed upload and the declaration. Draft the proposal in your own file and paste it in once it is finished, because the form is built for a settled text rather than a working one. At the time of writing that portal, at frg.ugc.ac.in, is not responding at all, which is worth knowing before you plan an application around a date.

Where the Application Sits After You Submit

There is no progress screen to refresh, and that is a published rule rather than a gap. The Commission runs the evaluation the way a journal handles a manuscript, as a paperless exercise in which no interim queries will be entertained, per the scheme guidelines. Nobody is available to tell you where your file has reached, so there is no point in looking for them.

What replaces a status check is a single announcement. The result is declared on the UGC website, and a selected candidate downloads the award letter from there rather than receiving it. That makes the Commission's own pages the thing to watch, and it makes the download the moment your deadlines start rather than end, because activating the grant is timed from the date on that letter.

Once money has been sanctioned the trail leaves the portal entirely. The sanction is in the institution's name, the reference number sits with its finance or research section, and a question about a delayed instalment is answered there. Find out who holds that file before the first release, not after it fails to arrive.

How winners are picked

Selection process

The entry conditions screen the person; the referees score the project. Every proposal goes to a minimum of three referees the Commission assigns by the area of research proposed, and they read for three things: the merit of the project itself, the professional standing of the applicant, and the institution where the work would be carried out. A final merit list is generated from the scores those referees return, per the scheme guidelines.

That third criterion is the one worth pausing on, because it means the employer is assessed twice. It has already had to be an eligible kind of institution before the application could be filed, and it is then weighed again as a place where the research can credibly be done. A proposal that needs facilities the department does not have is arguing against itself on a criterion the applicant cannot fix.

The completed supervisions and closed projects separate nobody at this stage, since everyone still in the running has cleared the same retrospective test. They are the ticket in, not the ranking.

Two things are then left deliberately unstated. No weightage, score sheet or cut-off is attached to any of the three criteria, so a rejected applicant has no way of learning which one sank the proposal. And an award, once made, can still be withdrawn or cancelled with no reason given at all, a discretion the guidelines reserve to the Commission in as many words.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

Most obligations fall due after the money has arrived, and they are shared between the awardee and the institution. Each further release is conditional on a utilisation certificate for what has already gone, and that certificate also records the unspent amount being carried forward, so a slow-spending year does not vanish but does have to be declared. It carries an audit tail as well: if a check or audit objection turns up an irregularity later, the objected amount has to be refunded, adjusted or regularised.

Reporting is owed twice over, and by two different parties. While the work is running the obligation is the awardee's, discharged as a feedback report on the research entered through the web portal. At the close it passes to the employer: the institution is the one that has to send in a summary of the finished work, along with whatever papers came out of it.

Termination is not reserved for fraud. The guidelines open the list at misconduct and close it at plain violation of the award's terms, which means ordinary non-compliance is enough on its own. One ground on that list works differently from the others, though, because it needs no wrongdoing at all: an awardee found ineligible after the money has been sanctioned loses the grant anyway. A condition misread at the application stage is therefore never settled by the arrival of an award letter. Where there was intent, false information and fraudulent activity draw penal consequences on top of losing the award.

One protection runs against all of it. The faculty member must be given a reasonable opportunity to defend themselves before the Commission terminates or cancels, so a finding is contestable rather than summary.

Get help

Contact

UGC publishes no desk specific to this award. Its head-office switchboard, 011-23604446 and 011-23604200, sits in the footer of the scheme page itself and again on the Faculty Corner that lists the three faculty awards. Written queries go to contact.ugc@nic.in, and anything posted is addressed to Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, New Delhi 110002.

The helpdesk that would normally take a question about the form sits on the fellowship and research grant portal, which is currently unreachable, so that switchboard is the only working route to the Commission while the outage lasts.

For anything concerning money already sanctioned, the useful conversation is with your own institution, because the sanction was made in its name and the certificates that release each instalment are signed there.

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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