Scheme of Internship for Post-Graduate/Research Students(SIPGRS)

Overview

About SIPGRS

India's official numbers are compiled in a handful of divisions at Khurshid Lal Bhawan and in a network of field offices, and this internship is the route that puts a statistics student inside them on a stipend. The ministry has notified it every year under two different names, and the second name changed both who may apply and when the money reaches the bank. The 2023-24 round offered 193 places; the Phase I notice for 2026-27 offered 230, by which point the whole application had moved off email and onto a portal of its own.

The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation runs the internship through its Training Unit, and what it offers is exposure to the machinery behind official statistics rather than to policy argument. The 2023-24 notice put 193 internships on the table, sorted into Group A for offices in New Delhi and Group B for offices in the rest of the country, and it named the desks: National Accounts Statistics at NAD, index numbers and energy statistics at ESD, price statistics at PSD, project monitoring at IPMD, and survey subjects such as ASI, UFS and MCPC at NSSO field offices (Scheme of Internship for Post-Graduate/Research Students 2023-24, MoSPI).

From 2025 the ministry renotified the same idea as the National Internship in Official Statistics, kept the Group A and Group B split, and pulled in newer work: web scraping of e-commerce and scanner data for price statistics, unit-level analysis of national sample surveys, and survey series such as PLFS and ASUSE. Phase I of 2026-27 carried 230 slots, 31 of them in Delhi offices and 199 outside them (Phase I of National Internship in Official Statistics 2026-27, MoSPI).

One of the older scheme's stated objectives was to make statistics students aware of the Indian Statistical Service and the Subordinate Statistical Service, and to sensitise them about choosing a career in the field. That is the honest frame for it: a short posting that shows you what the work is before you sit an exam for it.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

The scheme has no standing calendar. Each round is announced by its own notice, and the closing date lives only in that notice.

The intake has not moved in one direction, and neither has the calendar. The older notices required the whole posting to be over by August, which made it a summer job; the NIOS notices set a March to September band instead, wide enough for a six-month slot to sit anywhere inside it, and they label the round Phase I, so a single academic year can carry more than one call (Phase I of National Internship in Official Statistics 2026-27, MoSPI). A closing date quoted on an aggregator is therefore worth nothing without the notice it was lifted from. The myScheme entry carries no closing date at all, which is why the listing can look permanently open (myScheme, Scheme of Internship for Post-Graduate/Research Students).

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Which rule binds you depends on which notice is live, and the two are not the same test. Under the older scheme the applicant had to be an Indian citizen pursuing post-graduation or research at a recognised college, university or research institute in Statistics, Mathematical Statistics, Operations Research, Economics, Demography or an applied field of statistics. The NIOS notice replaced that single line with three routes and a marks bar on each, and it opened the scheme to bonafide students of recognised institutions within India or abroad.

The longer postings are therefore closed to anyone still enrolled. If you are mid-degree, the notice restricts you to slots of two to three months, so read the slot table in the annexure before you pick a centre, because each centre publishes its own duration alongside its seat count.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

Walking out early is the costly mistake. An intern who leaves or discontinues before completing the period they were taken on for gets no stipend and no certificate, and the notices repeat that line in both the older and the current text. Two more traps are procedural rather than academic. NIOS applicants may apply in Group A or in Group B but not both, and submitting in both categories leads to disqualification and blacklisting. An application that arrives without the required form and supporting documents is rejected outright, which under the 2023-24 process meant that a missing filled-in MS Excel file killed the application on its own.

The ministry also states plainly that the award of an internship is not and cannot be construed as any kind of job, or as an assurance of a job, in the Government of India. That disclaimer sits at the foot of every notice in this series.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

There is nothing to renew. The internship runs for the fixed period written against the centre you are allotted, ends with the report you submit, and the notices publish no extension route and no second term for a former intern. What repeats is the scheme, not the placement: MoSPI re-notifies it each year, and has split a single year into phases, so a fresh application against a fresh notice is the only way back in.

What you get

Award & benefits

The stipend is the same headline figure in both eras, but the payment rule changed and that is what matters to a student budgeting a summer. Under the older scheme the money was a token amount released only after the internship ended. Under NIOS it is monthly, and it is released only when the nodal officer or guide sends in a progress report for the preceding month.

Payment reaches the intern only by electronic transfer, PFMS, the Aadhaar Payments Bridge or the Aadhaar Enabled Payment System, and no cash changes hands. Set against that, the ministry pays no travelling or daily allowance for reaching the allotted office, so a student allotted a centre in another state absorbs the travel and the rent themselves.

• Remuneration: Internship Stipend: A consolidated stipend of ₹10,000 (₹5,000 per month) is provided upon successful completion of the internship. - Direct Benefit Transfer: The stipend is transferred directly to the intern’s bank account through electronic payment modes such as APB/AEPS. - Cashless Payment System: No cash payment is made under the internship programme. - Certificate of Completion: A certificate is issued to interns after successful completion of the internship by the concerned office. - Field Visit Allowance: Interns attached to NSSO (FOD) Zonal/Regional Offices receive an additional ₹250 per day for field visits, subject to a maximum of 10 days during the internship period.
• Facilities: Logistics Support: Internship centres may provide office space, intercom, computer, and internet facilities to interns during the internship period. - Access to Study Material: Interns will be allowed access to study materials and literature available in the office/library. - Guidance & Mentorship: Each intern will be assigned a guide/nodal officer for assistance and coordination during the internship. - Interaction with Officials: Interns may interact with concerned divisions/officers through the assigned guide for completion of their assignments.
• Notes: No Travelling Allowance or Daily allowance etc. will be paid by the Ministry for joining the place of internship allotted to them or after the completion of the internship.
• The selected candidates have to make their own arrangements for their lodging, boarding and transport, etc.
• Interns may be required to bring their own laptops, depending on the availability of facilities.

What to prepare

Documents required

The paperwork is ordinary; the attestation is what trips people up. The photograph on the form and the No Objection Certificate both have to be attested by the head of the institution where you are studying, and the NIOS notice prints the NOC in a fixed format as an annexure, naming the institute, the university, the recognising authority and the internship dates. Keep your higher secondary, graduation and post-graduation mark sheets ready, along with the identity card issued for your current course or another document proving your student status.

One document is easy to forget and is called out separately in both eras: if your marks are in CGPA, you must attach the conversion formula from CGPA to percentage. Selection runs on percentages, so a CGPA transcript with no conversion note leaves the selection point unable to place you at all.

Step by step

How to apply

Under the current notice the whole application is a portal form. Open the live notice on the ministry's site, decide between Group A and Group B, fill the form at internship.mospi.gov.in, get the photograph and NOC attested, keep the mark sheets and the identity card handy for upload, and submit once before the deadline printed in that notice. The route the older scheme used is gone: it asked applicants to register on the National Career Service portal, download an MS Excel application file for their group, print it, sign the undertaking and email the set to the nodal office with a copy to training-mospi@nic.in under an exact subject line.

How to track your application and the result. The 2026-27 notice tells applicants that selected candidates are informed through the online portal, and asks all candidates to keep checking the status of their application form on that portal from time to time. Selection is also communicated by email, and the list of selected interns is displayed on the MoSPI website for Group A and on the notice board of the respective office for Group B. After joining, the intern submits bank account details through the same portal, which is where the monthly stipend is set up. Queries go only to the nodal officer of the centre you applied to, under the subject line the notice specifies, and the ministry says emails with any other subject line may not be considered.

How winners are picked

Selection process

There is no interview and no written test. Candidates are ranked purely on aggregate marks, excluding the qualifying subjects, and the office you are allotted follows from that ranking together with the place option you exercised on the form. The older notice read those marks off graduation alone; the 2026-27 notice runs the same rule through the online portal and reads them off class 12 or equivalent, graduation or post-graduation, whichever applies to your route.

Who does the ranking depends on where you applied. The Training Unit of the Capacity Development Division selects for Group A. For regional and zonal offices, state directorates of economics and statistics and other centres in a given city, the Regional Head of the NSO field office selects, and the Kolkata centres are handled by the Enterprise Survey Division. Where a state capital has several participating offices, a selection committee headed by that regional office chief includes a representative of each, and every selection point prepares its own list separately. That is why two applicants with similar marks can hear back on very different days.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The deliverable is fixed and it is not optional. Every intern submits a report or paper, with a soft copy, at the end of the assignment, setting out observations and any suggestions for improving the system they worked inside. That report is what the completion certificate is issued against, by the office the intern was attached to.

A few operating conditions are worth reading before you rank your preferred centres. The slot counts in the annexures are described as tentative and may increase, decrease or relocate with the approval of the competent authority, so the seat you applied against is not guaranteed to survive to allotment. Joining dates are decided locally by the selection point or the internship centre, within the window the notice sets. And the ministry says no enquiries will be entertained by offices other than the designated ones, which means a follow-up sent to a general ministry address does not count as having followed up.

Get help

Contact

The Group A annexure of the latest notice prints the internship centres without a contact column of their own (Phase I of National Internship in Official Statistics 2026-27, MoSPI), so the ministry's own address for the unit has to be read off the notice before it.

There, for Group A, it is the Deputy Director, Training Unit, MoSPI, at Room No. 520D, 5th Floor, K. L. Bhawan, Janpath, New Delhi 110001, with 011-23455650/551 as the phone number and training-mospi@gov.in as the email address (National Internship in Official Statistics 2025, MoSPI). Older write-ups still quote Room No. 508 and the training-mospi@nic.in address, which is where the same unit sat when it ran the 2023-24 round (Scheme of Internship for Post-Graduate/Research Students 2023-24, MoSPI).

For Group B, the correct address is not the ministry at all. Each centre in the annexure prints its own nodal office, usually the Regional Head of the NSO field office for that city, with a phone number and an email built from the city code, such as ro.pun-fod@nic.in for Pune. Send the application and every later query 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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