Saraswati Vidya Yojana: Free Distribution of Bicycles - DNH&DD(SVYFDB)

Overview

About SVYFDB

The Saraswati Vidya Yojana free bicycle is a bicycle. No amount is credited against a girl's name, no bank account is involved, and there is no form for a parent to fill in. The cycles arrive at a government school and the head of that school hands them out. Nobody in the family has to do anything to get on the list, because the list is the school's own Class 8 enrolment register, and it goes up to the District Education Office whether or not the family knows it exists.

Saraswati Vidya Yojana is an umbrella scheme of the Directorate of Education, UT Administration of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu. It runs two components at once, and a reader who arrives on the name rather than on the benefit can easily end up reading the wrong half. Component I is the cycle. Component II is a fee claim filed years later by a domiciled girl in a professional course, with a form, a window and a bank transfer behind it. The revised Saraswati Vidya Yojana notification issued by the Directorate of Education in April 2026 sets both out under one order and supersedes every earlier notification on the subject.

The two halves of the union territory ran the scheme separately before they were one territory. Daman and Diu notified Saraswati Vidya Yojana as an umbrella scheme in 2015 and revised it in 2018, listing free distribution of bicycles among its components. Dadra and Nagar Haveli kept a file of its own for the purchase, headed Free Cycle/Girls, at its Directorate of Education in Silvassa, and that remained the file the cycles were bought on after the merger. Both territories were folded into one on January 26, 2020, and the cycles now move under a single order that reaches Silvassa, Daman and Diu alike, instead of under two orders with two different wordings.

That history is worth holding on to, because older circulars survive on the web long after the order behind them has been superseded, and the wording has not stayed still. What follows is the rule the revised notification actually states.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

The calendar for this component is the school calendar. Neither the scheme record nor the notification puts a start or a last date against the cycles, because a benefit that nobody applies for has no window to open. What the order does fix is the moment of supply: cycles reach the schools when the new academic year begins, which makes the weeks around reopening the sensible time to raise it and makes waiting for an announcement a waste of a year.

The two application windows written into the same notification, one at mid-year and one in winter, belong to the fee reimbursement component. They have no bearing on a Class 8 girl waiting for a cycle, and a family that treats them as a deadline is watching the wrong half of the scheme.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

A girl studying in Class 8 in a government school of the union territory qualifies. The notification's target beneficiary clause puts it in those terms and asks nothing further of her. There is no income ceiling, no marks bar, no caste condition and no minimum distance between home and school; the clause sets a class, a sex and a school type, and stops.

The income tests, the domicile requirement and the first-attempt rule that sit in the same notification belong to the fee reimbursement component. Read across, they make the bicycle look far harder to reach than it is, and that misreading is easy to fall into because a single PDF carries both sets.

What decides a case in practice is the school register rather than the girl. The head of the school reports the Class 8 girls' enrolment to the District Education Office, and cycles are supplied against that figure. A girl who transfers into a government school after the enrolment statement has gone up therefore depends on the school correcting its number, not on any step she can take herself. Asking the head of the school whether her name sits inside the count is the one useful thing a parent can do early.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

A cycle is issued once in a girl's school life. Having received one under the scheme, she is not provided the same in any subsequent year, whatever became of the first one, so a cycle lost, stolen or outgrown is not a fresh claim.

The rest of the exclusions follow from the eligibility rather than from a separate list. A boy is outside the component. A girl in Class 7 or Class 9 is outside it for that year. A school that is not a government school of the union territory is outside it altogether, and the scheme record answers the private-school question in the negative without qualification.

The notification also carries a penalty clause aimed at the beneficiary rather than at the school. Forgery of documents, a false declaration, or availing multiple benefits at a time can be met with recovery of the benefit or with legal action as the administration sees fit.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

A bicycle handed over in Class 8 stays handed over, and nothing about it comes up again in a later class. The girl keeps it as she moves up through the school, subject to the conditions further down, and the once-only clause means she never rejoins the count for a second one.

What you get

Award & benefits

One bicycle, supplied free, is the whole of the benefit. Nothing is credited to an account, nothing is bought by the family and claimed back afterwards, and no cash equivalent is offered in place of the cycle. That is the line between this component and the rest of what Saraswati Vidya Yojana does, and between it and the cycle schemes elsewhere that transfer money and leave the purchase to the parent.

The notification names no model, no unit cost and no number of cycles for a year, and the administration publishes no distribution figure for the component, so how many go out in a given year is not on the public record.

The cycles are bought rather than budgeted as cash. The Directorate of Education at Silvassa ran the purchase as an open e-tender for a ladies bicycle to a written specification, inviting manufacturers, authorised dealers and suppliers to bid with samples on the union territory's e-procurement portal, under Tender ID 2021_UTDNH_5542_1 on the Free Cycle/Girls file. The bid deadline on that purchase was pushed back more than once before it closed, by a corrigendum in late September and again by one in the middle of October, which is the ordinary rhythm of a supply tender and a reason a school year can turn before cycles appear.

Delivery is timed to the school year. Bicycles are supplied to the schools at the commencement of the new academic year against the enrolment the heads of schools have reported, and the head of the school is the officer responsible for distributing them inside the school. The order sets out no receipt, undertaking or declaration for a parent to sign at the counter of any office. The obligations it places on the family all begin after the cycle has been handed over.

• The girl students of class VIII of Government Schools of this UT will be provided bicycle for free.

What to prepare

Documents required

No document is listed against this component. The scheme record publishes a blank documents field, and the document list inside the notification, running to fee receipts, a domicile certificate, an income certificate, an Aadhaar seeded bank passbook and marksheets, is attached to the fee reimbursement component. The Class 8 enrolment record the school already maintains does the work a document list would otherwise do.

Step by step

How to apply

No family applies for a cycle, and knowing that saves a wasted season. The procedure the notification sets for this component runs entirely between two offices. The head of the school sends the Class 8 girls' enrolment to the District Education Office, the cycles are supplied against that enrolment, and the head of the school distributes them. No form, no portal login, no fee and no deadline stands between the family and the bicycle.

That is also why the administration has never advertised the cycles. Saraswati Vidya Yojana advertisements do appear, including the advertisement for academic year 2025-26 that the Directorate of Education published in June 2026, but each one calls for online applications for fee reimbursement, because that is the component an applicant has to act on. Silence about the cycles in the notice board is not evidence that the cycles have stopped.

Following Up When the Cycles Do Not Reach a School

Without an application there is no application number, which closes the obvious route. The union territory's Saraswati Vidya Yojana portal offers a tracker that asks for an application number and returns the status of a fee reimbursement claim. It has nothing to look up for a girl who never filed anything.

The follow-up that does work runs back up the chain the cycles come down. Ask the head of the school whether the Class 8 girls' enrolment for the year has gone to the District Education Office and whether the girl is inside that count. If it has gone and nothing has arrived, the District Education Office for the district is the next door, and the Directorate of Education at Moti Daman sits above all three district offices. The notification names grievance redressal offices separately for Dadra and Nagar Haveli, for Daman and for Diu, so a question raised in the right district does not have to travel.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Nobody is picked over anybody else. The order promises the cycle to the Class 8 girls of the government schools of the union territory as a class, so there is no merit list, no quota split between schools and no committee sitting in judgement on individual girls. The scrutiny committee, the spot verification of institutions and the approval of the Administrator that the notification describes belong to the fee reimbursement component, where each application is examined against the eligibility criteria before it is sanctioned. On the bicycle side the enrolment count is the list, and the only judgement anyone exercises is whether the count is right.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The conditions bite after the handover rather than before it, and the revised order is stricter than the Daman and Diu text it replaced.

The head of the school of a middle, high or higher secondary school holds the right to make an enquiry into how a bicycle supplied under the scheme is actually being used. If a cycle is found to have been sold, the Directorate of Education and the District Offices hold the right to take legal action against the girl's parents. The third condition is not phrased as a right at all: the order states that the bicycle shall be seized from a girl student who drops the school before completing higher secondary education.

That seizure clause is the new one. The 2018 Daman and Diu notification carried the usage enquiry and the action on a sale, but nothing that took a cycle back for leaving school. Its arrival ties the benefit to the objective the order states for it, which is retaining girls through the secondary and higher secondary stage rather than simply putting cycles into circulation.

Oversight of the whole scheme, cycles included, rests with a monitoring committee that the Director of Education chairs and that draws its members from the district panchayats, the municipalities, the Directorate and the district education offices.

Get help

Contact

Start at the school, and not as a formality. Only the head of the school can say whether a girl's name went up inside the Class 8 enrolment that the year's supply was calculated from, and every office above will open with that question.

After the school, write to the district education office for the district the school sits in. The notification lists one for each of the three districts, at Lekha Bhavan in Amli, Silvassa for Dadra and Nagar Haveli, at Shiksha Sadan in Moti Daman for Daman, and at the Collectorate for Diu, and the district office is where the enrolment lands and the year's supply is worked out against it.

The Directorate of Education at Shiksha Sadan, Moti Daman sits above the three and owns the scheme, at diredu-dd@nic.in. For Dadra and Nagar Haveli there is a second line worth keeping, because the Silvassa Directorate that ran the cycle purchase printed doe-dnh@nic.in and 0260 2642006 on the tender papers for it.

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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