Scheme For Residential Education For Students in High Schools in Targeted Areas (SHRESHTA): Mode 2 - NGO Operated Schools(SHRESHTA-M2-NGOOS)

Overview

About SHRESHTA-M2-NGOOS

The revised SHRESHTA guidelines close the door on this component in one line: no new school shall be taken up under this mode (Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, revised SHRESHTA guidelines). What remains is a fixed set of schools and hostels run by voluntary organisations that were already drawing grant-in-aid, and the Ministry pays each of them a set amount for every Scheduled Caste child on their rolls. Nobody sits an exam for it and no parent fills a form. If you arrived looking for the SHRESHTA test the National Testing Agency conducts, that is Mode 1, and it runs on its own admissions portal.

SHRESHTA carries one name and two entirely separate machines. Mode 1 is the newer of the two, added when the scheme was revised with effect from 2021-22: meritorious SC students sit the National Entrance Test for SHRESHTA, and those selected are placed in top private residential schools (Press Information Bureau, 12 August 2025). Mode 2, the page you are reading, is the older grant-in-aid component that the revision kept in place.

Mode 2 pays organisations, not families. The Ministry describes it as financial assistance to NGOs running three kinds of project, residential schools, non-residential schools and hostels, for primary and secondary students alike (Press Information Bureau, 12 August 2025), with 13,500 slots earmarked each year for SC students (Press Information Bureau, 6 February 2024). The two modes are not the same size. Answering Parliament in December 2024, the Ministry counted 246 residential schools under Mode 1 against 51 under Mode 2 (Press Information Bureau, 10 December 2024).

Money is still flowing. The Union Budget for 2026-27 carries Rs 150.00 crore for SHRESHTA under Demand No. 93, against Rs 109.78 crore actually spent in 2024-25 (Notes on Demands for Grants, 2026-2027). The Department's own scheme page, though, still offers the 2023-24 to 2025-26 revised guidelines as the current rulebook (Department of Social Justice and Empowerment), so the operating document has run past the period printed on its cover.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

Both date fields on the myScheme record are blank, and that is the correct entry rather than a gap in it. The calendar that governs Mode 2 is the organisation's financial year, worked on the e-Anudaan portal, and no admission season attaches to it.

One date sits outside that annual rhythm and matters most to a family whose child is in an NGO-run primary school: the upgrade to at least Class 10 has to be complete before 2027, and a school that has not managed it may fall out of support. If a school has been adding a class a year, it should already be visible in this session's structure.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The student test in this sub-scheme runs to two lines. The beneficiary must belong to a Scheduled Caste community, and must be admitted in a school run by an organisation the scheme already funds. Everything else the record files under eligibility is about the organisation. The guidelines set no parental income ceiling for Mode 2 and name no qualifying class, because the grant covers primary and secondary projects alike. That is a real difference from Mode 1, where a parental income of up to Rs 2.5 lakh a year is a stated condition of selection (Press Information Bureau, 28 December 2023).

That organisation test is the one that decides whether a child's school is in the scheme at all. A body has to be a non-profit registered on the NITI Aayog NGO Darpan portal, running schools recognised by the State education department and affiliated to a State or Central Board, governed by a written constitution and a properly constituted managing committee, and carrying classes up to at least Class 12. Staffing carries a floor rather than a target: not fewer than six teachers in a school and not fewer than two in a hostel, with high school teachers graduates in their subject and holding a B.Ed (revised SHRESHTA guidelines).

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

myScheme publishes no exclusion list for this sub-scheme, but the guidelines carry three hard ones. The first is the closed list already quoted, which shuts out any organisation that was not already receiving grant-in-aid. The second is a deadline rather than a category: an NGO school running only Classes 1 to 8 has to upgrade to at least Class 10 before 2027, one class a year, or it may not be supported. The third is a quality bar with teeth, since institutions that do not conform to the revised guidelines are to receive no grant from the following financial year, and failure to hold State recognition, board affiliation, academic standards or adequate infrastructure entails cancellation of the grant (revised SHRESHTA guidelines).

Two more conditions reduce rather than remove the money. Where an organisation already draws grant-in-aid for the same purpose from another government source, the central assessment is made after taking that into account. Where a fee has been collected from a beneficiary, the amount shown in the accounts is deducted from the admissible grant (revised SHRESHTA guidelines). One exclusion often quoted with SHRESHTA does not apply here at all: the bar on schools funded through Navodaya Vidyalayas, Eklavya Model Residential Schools, Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas, PM-AJAY, Samagra Shiksha or PM SHRI sits in the Mode 1 school-selection rules.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Renewal in Mode 2 is annual and it is the organisation's to lose. Schools and hostels already receiving grant-in-aid are continued subject to satisfactory performance, tested each year by a physical inspection from the Ministry's Programme Management Unit, preferably in the first quarter of the academic session.

Attendance then decides how much of the sanctioned grant is actually released, on a four-step slab read off that inspection.

Alongside the inspection, the utilisation certificate for the last grant released, in the GFR 12A format, has to reach the Ministry before the next release. Beyond the recurring grant, an aided organisation becomes eligible for a non-recurring grant once every five years for fixed items such as furniture, bedding, laboratory equipment and CCTV installation.

What you get

Award & benefits

The grant is a per-head rate, fixed by level of schooling and by the kind of project, and it is paid to the organisation for each SC student it has admitted. Where a school admits students who are not SC, it is free to collect fees from them.

For a family, the useful reading of that rate is what it buys, because the guidelines spend far more words on the school's obligations than on the transfer itself. An aided school owes each child a cot and a bed, a toilet and bathroom shared by no more than ten children, three nutritious meals a day with the record kept up to date, clean drinking water, regular doctor visits with a log, a first-aid box and emergency medicines, four sets of uniform including shoes each year with distribution records, and games, physical education, yoga and a playground. Classrooms have to be one per class or section, lit and fanned, and girls' residential schools have to have female service staff, wardens and guards. CCTV has to be installed and linked to the school's website for live streaming, and attendance has to run on an Aadhaar-based system that a central portal can read (revised SHRESHTA guidelines). None of this is aspirational language. It is the performance standard the annual inspection measures.

• Financial Assistance
• _(Electronic transfer through e-Anudaan portal and Public Financial Management System)_
• Primary Level Students
• Residential: ₹44,000/- per Scheduled Caste student per year.
• Non-residential: ₹27,000/- per Scheduled Caste student per year.
• Hostel only: ₹30,000/- per Scheduled Caste student per year.
• Secondary Level Students
• Residential: ₹55,000/- per Scheduled Caste student per year.
• Non-residential: ₹35,000/- per Scheduled Caste student per year.
• Hostel only: ₹30,000/- per Scheduled Caste student per year.
• Non-Recurring Grants (Every 5 Years)
• Secondary Residential School (100 students): ₹3,85,000/- for fixed items plus ₹900/- per student.
• Secondary Non-residential School (100 students): ₹3,07,500/- fixed.
• Secondary Hostel (100 students): ₹2,30,000/- for fixed items plus ₹900/- per student.
• Primary Residential School (100 students): ₹2,72,500/- for fixed items plus ₹900/- per student.
• Primary Non-residential School (100 students): ₹1,95,000/- fixed.
• Hostel for destitute Children (100 students): ₹2,30,000/- for fixed items plus ₹900/- per student.
• Attendance-Based Grant Disbursement
• 75% or more attendance: Full grant.
• 50% to less than 75% attendance: 75% of grant.
• 25% to less than 50% attendance: 50% of grant.
• Less than 25% attendance: No grant (without valid grounds).

What to prepare

Documents required

Every document the scheme asks for is addressed to the organisation. The list runs from the project-specific ID the Department issues, through budget estimates for the year, the previous year's annual report and audited accounts, the utilisation certificate for the last grant, the State recognition and board affiliation certificates, the NGO Darpan registration, the managing committee's constitution and the executed agreement bond, to the maintained records the inspection expects to see for uniforms, food, doctor visits and CCTV footage.

A family has nothing on that list to produce. The only student-level information that enters the system is the entry the school itself makes: the guidelines put the duty of entering student details into the e-Anudaan database on the school, not on the parent (revised SHRESHTA guidelines).

Step by step

How to apply

There is no application for a parent to make. Admission to the school is the whole of it, and the grant follows the child once the school has recorded the admission.

The organisation's route is specific. It registers first on the NITI Aayog NGO Darpan portal to obtain an NGO Unique ID, then registers once on e-Anudaan with that ID and the organisation's PAN, after which its Darpan details are carried across in non-editable form (e-Anudaan portal, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment). Proposals are then filed online on that portal with the documents listed above, forwarded or recommended by the State Government or Union Territory Administration. Where a State recommendation has not arrived by 30 June, the case is taken up on the strength of the PMU's physical inspection instead. Grants are released in three instalments a year once the complete proposal and the inspection report are in, into a bank account operated jointly; where the organisation's headquarters sits away from the project, the funds move to a joint account at the project location within seven days. Use of the PFMS Expenditure, Advance and Transfer module is mandatory.

Tracking works differently here from a scholarship, and it is worth being plain about why: no payment is made to a student, so there is no student-facing payment status page to check. What the portal publishes instead is the queue a proposal sits in, worked by back-office users at the district, the State Directorate, the State Secretariat and the central Ministry, in this order: verification, checklist filling, inspection report, scrutinising, screening, recommendation, financial approval and grant-in-aid sanction (e-Anudaan portal). None of those stages is exposed as a public lookup; the portal offers a login, not a status search. What is open to anyone is the disclosure side, since every aided institution has to publish its performance on its own website and on the portal, and the scheme's management information system is linked by API to the Output Outcome Monitoring Framework dashboard (revised SHRESHTA guidelines).

Finding out whether a particular school is in the scheme takes two clicks in a place families rarely look. The Department's social audit portal keeps a table of NGOs covered under SHRESHTA that opens state by state and then district by district, and the district view names the organisation and prints its address, its project type, a contact person, a phone number and an email (NGOs covered under SHRESHTA). Maharashtra's row alone counts 34 of them across 17 districts. The project column is the part to read closely: an entry reading Hostel Secondary or Non-Residential School Secondary tells you which of the per-head rates the organisation draws for that project. The binding answer still sits with the State or Union Territory welfare department that forwards the proposals, and with the school itself, which has to disclose its grant position on its own website.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Mode 2 has no entrance test. That is the sharpest line between the two components: Mode 1 selects about 3,000 SC students a year through the National Entrance Test for SHRESHTA conducted by the National Testing Agency (Press Information Bureau, 10 December 2024), and the selected students are then offered their school choices through a web counselling system (revised SHRESHTA guidelines), while Mode 2 selects institutions and leaves students to ordinary school admission.

What is selected, each year, is which existing projects continue. Institutions found to have satisfactory infrastructure on the Ministry or PMU inspection, and conforming to the scheme's conditions, are carried forward; those that do not conform stop receiving grant from the next financial year. The sanction is issued in the name of the organisation's President or Secretary. Sanctioned strength for an ongoing project can be raised only with the approval of the Secretary of the Department, and there is no provision for extra seats when a school upgrades from primary to secondary level (revised SHRESHTA guidelines).

For the child, there is nothing to select into. The revised guidelines publish no rule for deciding which SC children inside an aided school are counted against the grant, beyond their being SC and admitted, and no other Ministry document supplies one (revised SHRESHTA guidelines).

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The conditions that reach a family are short and worth knowing. No capitation fee or donation of any kind may be charged from a beneficiary, and any fee that is charged has to appear in the accounts filed with the Ministry and is then deducted from the grant. CCTV live feed has to be available from every institution, though the right to view it can be restricted in specific cases. A change in the project's location needs the State Government or Union Territory Administration's approval.

The rest binds the organisation's books. Separate accounts for scheme grants, always open to inspection by government officers and to the Comptroller and Auditor General; an asset register in the GFR proforma covering items of permanent value with a life of at least five years costing Rs 10,000 and above; audited accounts with a utilisation certificate after each financial year; unspent grant refunded or set off against the next year's entitlement; and interest earned on the grant remitted to the Consolidated Fund of India under rule 230(8) of GFR 2017. Suppressed or incorrect information can bring cancellation and a demand to refund the grant with interest at 12%, and an organisation found to have given false information or indulged in unethical practices is blacklisted, with the blacklisting reported to NITI Aayog so that its name is removed from the NGO Darpan portal (revised SHRESHTA guidelines).

Get help

Contact

Queries about the portal itself go to the e-Anudaan helpdesk at support.ngo-msje@nic.in, which the Ministry publishes alongside its NGO registration instructions (e-Anudaan portal). Because proposals are routed through the State Government or Union Territory Administration, the state's social welfare or social justice department is the working contact for anything about a specific project.

There is no helpline written for parents here, and the nearest named human is on the social audit table rather than in a scheme document: each aided organisation is listed there with a contact person, a phone number and an email address (NGOs covered under SHRESHTA). The sub-scheme adds nothing above that. Its scheme page offers a single number, 18002021989, and that line answers for the whole Department rather than for SHRESHTA (Department of Social Justice and Empowerment).

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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