State Technical Scholarship for ST Student(STSSTS)

Overview

About STSSTS

This scholarship closes twice. For the cycle the Directorate of Technical Education has notified for 2026 the online window runs from 1 October to 31 December 2026, and the printed application then has to reach the Directorate by 22 January 2027, after which the notification says no forms will be accepted (Department of Information and Public Relations, Nagaland). An applicant who treats the portal receipt as the end of the process can still lose the award on a step that takes an envelope.

The Directorate of Technical Education in Kohima runs this scheme itself, and its own signed guidelines describe the support as a book grant for Scheduled Tribe students in technical courses at institutions recognised by the All India Council for Technical Education (State Technical Scholarship guidelines). Book grant is the operative phrase in that objective clause: the state is undertaking to help with the cost of books, not to waive a tuition bill and not to stand in for the general post-matric support that ST students in Nagaland draw from a different directorate.

Where the student studies does not matter, as long as the institution does. The Directorate's notifications repeatedly describe the eligible group as Scheduled Tribe students of Nagaland pursuing diploma, undergraduate and postgraduate courses in engineering anywhere within India, at institutions recognised by AICTE and the Council of Architecture (Department of Information and Public Relations, Nagaland). A Naga student at an engineering college in Guwahati or Bengaluru is inside the scheme; a Naga student at a college in Kohima that no technical council recognises is outside it.

Nagaland's Common Scholarship Portal lists this one under Technical Education as a state scheme, funded by the State Government and hosted on the portal itself, while the central schemes an engineering student here might also be eligible for are tagged on the same listing for the National Scholarship Portal (Common Scholarship Portal). The distinction decides where you file: this application never touches scholarships.gov.in.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

The window opens once a year, in the autumn, and the Directorate announces it through the state's Department of Information and Public Relations rather than on its own site.

Extensions are common enough to be part of the pattern rather than a rescue: one cycle was carried to 31 January 2022, and the window notified on 5 December 2022 ran to 15 February 2023 (Department of Information and Public Relations, Nagaland, extension notice). Between cycles the scheme sits on the portal marked closed, with its guidelines still downloadable (Common Scholarship Portal).

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Two certificates decide this, and they are separate documents. The applicant has to be a Scheduled Tribe and an indigenous inhabitant of Nagaland, and both certificates are issued out of the office of the Deputy Commissioner in the applicant's district (District Noklak, Government of Nagaland). The Directorate uses the phrase "Indigenous and Schedule Tribes of Nagaland" in its notifications, which is why an ST certificate on its own does not finish the test (Department of Information and Public Relations, Nagaland).

Nagaland publishes two different income ceilings for this one scheme. The Directorate's scholarship page puts the parents' annual income ceiling from all sources at Rs 6 lakh and tags it EWS (Directorate of Technical Education, Nagaland). The signed guidelines hosted against the scheme on the state portal put the ceiling at Rs 8 lakh per annum during the current financial year (State Technical Scholarship guidelines). Ask the Technical Education nodal officer which figure applies to the cycle you are applying in, before you pay for an income certificate.

Who signs that income certificate was fixed afresh in 2025. The Governor designated the Deputy Commissioner, the Revenue Officer and other officers in the Deputy Commissioner's office not below the rank of Sub-Divisional Officer as the competent authorities to issue a Family Income Certificate, on a declaration made before a Notary Public (Higher and Technical Education Department, Nagaland). The Directorate then told ST students applying for the AICTE and State Technical scholarships that this is the order their certificate has to come under (Department of Information and Public Relations, Nagaland). A certificate signed anywhere else is not the document the Directorate asked for.

Two more conditions sit in the guidelines rather than on the scheme page. The candidate has to be studying in the recognised institution in regular mode, which puts distance and part-time enrolment outside the scheme, and the candidate must not already be receiving a Central, State or AICTE sponsored scholarship.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

No exclusion list is published for this scheme anywhere; what disqualifies a Naga applicant is spread across the eligibility notes on the Directorate's page and the terms at the foot of the guidelines. In practice four things end an application: a course outside engineering, architecture or the forestry programmes the scheme names; employment with any government or semi-government establishment; a second scholarship held in the same academic year; and a certificate that does not survive verification.

The last one is not a paperwork slap. The guidelines say a false, fake or fraudulent document, or a second scholarship in the same year, gets the candidate blacklisted and debarred under the State Technical Scholarship, and a false income, Scheduled Tribe, indigenous inhabitant or domicile certificate is reported to the Government for legal action.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Renewal is an application, not a rollover. The guidelines have the renewal student apply again through the state portal for the next year, and require a promotion or bonafide certificate from the Head of Institution alongside the previous semester marksheet. A student who fails to be promoted to the next class forfeits the scholarship, which makes the promotion certificate the load-bearing document in a renewal file rather than the marks on it.

The Directorate's notifications open the window to fresh and renewal applicants together, in the same weeks, on the same portal (Department of Information and Public Relations, Nagaland). There is one exception worth knowing: the guidelines allow a student to claim for a backlog, provided no other scholarship has been availed.

What you get

Award & benefits

The Directorate does not publish a rate for this scholarship. The guidelines describe the assistance as a book grant, the myScheme record says the amount follows the course or programme the student is enrolled in, and neither the Directorate's scholarship page nor the portal listing carries a slab table, an annual figure or a ceiling. Nagaland does publish rates for its other schemes, so the absence here is a gap in what this Directorate discloses rather than a habit across the state (Directorate of Higher Education, Nagaland).

What is published is how the money moves. The guidelines signed by the Director say the scholarship is paid after selection through DBT mode on an annual basis, so it is one credit a year rather than a monthly stipend, and it reaches the bank account the applicant seeded with Aadhaar. The Directorate made that seeding mandatory for every eligible applicant when the Aadhaar Payment Bridge came in under DBT (Department of Information and Public Relations, Nagaland). The tenure caps by course level are in the scheme record below.

The number of awards sanctioned each year is not published by the Directorate or on the portal listing.

• Under the scheme, financial assistance/scholarships will be given to students according to the course/programme in which they are enrolled.
• Scholarship shall be provided for a maximum period of 3 years for Diploma, 4 years for Degree (B.E/B.Tech.), and 2 years for (M.E/M.Tech).

What to prepare

Documents required

The scheme record lists the full document set, so the useful thing to add is the three that applicants underestimate.

The first is the Institution Verification Certificate, signed by the Head of Institution. The guidelines require it from fresh applicants and again from renewal applicants, which means the file cannot be finished on a laptop alone; it needs a signature from the college the student is enrolled in, and colleges outside Nagaland have no reason to know this scheme exists until they are asked.

The second is the bank passbook, which the guidelines want Aadhaar seeded before it is uploaded at all. They also rule out an account in a parent's name and, where the account is joint, they want the applicant named on the front page of the passbook. The Directorate also states it will not be held liable for a payment that fails because of a wrong or inactive account, which is the whole of the recourse on offer.

The third is legibility. The guidelines say every document uploaded in the e-form has to be clear and readable, and an unreadable upload is grounds for rejection and cancellation. A phone photograph of a marksheet at an angle is a real reason applications die.

Step by step

How to apply

Applications run only on the state's Common Scholarship Portal, at scholarship.nagaland.gov.in, and only while the Directorate's window is open. The account is created against an Aadhaar-linked mobile number, the applicant profile and the DigiLocker identity check have to be finished before an application can be created at all, and the scheme and the category, fresh or renewal, are chosen at the point the draft is started (Common Scholarship Portal). The portal also allows only one scholarship application at a time, which matters here because the same student may be looking at an AICTE scheme in the same season (Common Scholarship Portal).

Submission is final. The portal locks a submitted application and its own guidance is that a submitted application cannot be edited unless it is rejected; the guidelines say the same thing more bluntly, that correction or rectification after submission is not possible and will not be entertained. Preview the application properly, because there is no second pass.

Then comes the step the portal cannot do for you. After a successful online application, the Directorate requires the hard copy of that application at the office of the Department of Technical Education by a stated date, and it says forms will not be accepted after it (Department of Information and Public Relations, Nagaland).

Where the Application Sits After You Submit It

The submitted application appears on the applicant dashboard with a status badge, and the portal moves it from Submitted to Under Process, then Verified, then Approved as officials work through it; the dashboard also carries the application ID and a downloadable copy of the submission (Common Scholarship Portal). That ladder is the only tracking there is, and a status that has not moved is not a payment problem yet.

Chase the right desk. The portal's help desk is staffed for portal and technical issues only, on working days, and the portal says every scholarship has a dedicated nodal officer who handles eligibility, documents and application-status questions (Common Scholarship Portal). For the State Technical Scholarship that officer is Vichosunuo Kintso, reachable on 8837409464 (Common Scholarship Portal). The portal's own standing advice is that only one bank account can be Aadhaar seeded at a time and that the consent for it is given at the bank branch, so a credit that has not landed after an approval is a matter for the branch before it is one for the Directorate.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Selection is on marks, and on which marks depends on the course being entered. The guidelines say the candidate is selected on the merit of the last examination passed: the Class 10 result for a diploma applicant, the Class 12 or equivalent result, or diploma marks in a lateral entry case, for a degree applicant, and the degree result for a masters applicant. Supporting documents have to be complete alongside it.

Nothing else is published to sit between that marksheet and the award list: the guidelines set out no interview, no test of the Directorate's own and no qualifying percentage. The guidelines add only that incomplete applications are summarily rejected and that verified applications alone are considered for the award, so a strong marksheet in a thin file does not compete.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

Applications are invited once a year through the state scholarship portal, and the guidelines put the consequences of the obvious mistakes in writing: an Aadhaar number is mandatory to apply, incomplete applications are summarily rejected, nothing can be corrected after submission, and only verified applications reach the award stage. The Directorate signs off with a line disclaiming liability for a scholarship that does not arrive because the applicant supplied a wrong or inactive bank account.

One condition deserves reading twice, because it is the one students trip on innocently. One student is entitled to one scholarship only, and a candidate found holding more than one in the same academic year is disqualified and debarred under this scheme, not merely asked to return the second award.

Get help

Contact

The Directorate of Technical Education sits below the New Secretariat on Thizama Road in Kohima, at PIN 797004, and publishes 0370-2270409 and 0370-2271432 as its numbers and dir.techedu-ngl@nic.in and tenagaland@gmail.com as its addresses (Directorate of Technical Education, Nagaland). This is also the office that receives the hard copy of a submitted application.

For questions about eligibility, documents or where an application has reached, the scheme's nodal officer is the correct first contact, and the portal publishes the name and number against the scheme listing (Common Scholarship Portal). Anything that breaks inside the portal itself is a third queue again, answered on 9863771513 or 9863386145 and at scholarshipnagaland@gmail.com, weekdays only (Common Scholarship Portal).

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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References

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