Study in India Programme(SIIP)

Overview

About SIIP

An Indian citizen living in India cannot apply to this programme, and no reading of the rules opens it up. Study in India (SII) is the Ministry of Education's admission route for foreign nationals coming into Indian institutions, and its scheme record puts the bar in a single line: Indian nationals are not eligible. The portal has since let Non-Resident Indians register, with a condition attached that most write-ups leave out, and there is one separate Government of India scheme that does fund children of Indian-origin families settled abroad. Those two points are why the rest of this page is worth reading; the domestic scholarship an Indian student is usually looking for lives on a different portal altogether.

Study in India is an admission platform first and a funding scheme a distant second. The Ministry of Education runs it as a single window where a foreign student registers once, receives a Study in India student ID, applies to several institutions at the same time, and then moves through visa and FRRO formalities on the same login.

The portal was introduced on 18 April 2018 and rebuilt into its present form on 3 August 2023, when the Ministry of Education relaunched it jointly with the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of External Affairs so that registration, student ID, application, visa processing and FRRO all sat in one system, according to the programme's own account of itself.

How large the network is depends on which SII page you open. The About Us page describes a partnership of more than 600 colleges carrying upward of 8,000 courses, in its expansion story. The six-step panel on the front page counts differently, inviting students to explore more than 24,000 courses across more than 1,200 Indian institutes, on the portal's own home page. A course question in the FAQ gives a third figure again, over 2,600 courses, on the same site as the other two, in the programme section of the FAQ. None of the three is dated, so a student cannot tell which one describes the intake being advertised now.

A partner institute has to clear at least one quality test to be listed: a place in the NIRF, a valid NAAC score of 3.01 on a scale of 4.0, Institution of National Importance or Institute of Eminence status, a listing in QS World Ranking Asia from 2024 onwards, autonomous status granted by a statutory body or ministry, admissions filled to 80% for five consecutive academic years, or NBA accreditation across 30% of eligible courses, as the About Us page sets out.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

No round on this portal is answerable from a published date. SII puts no national closing date on its public pages, its Circulars page renders a table with headings and no rows under them, and the registration step is described only as being for the current academic year. The working deadlines reach applicants through the dashboard and through the institutes, which is why the dashboard rather than a calendar is the thing to watch.

That SPDC date has already gone. The newest guideline and application form the Ministry of External Affairs lists on its SPDC page are both for 2025-26, while the most recent list of awardees published there is for the academic year 2021-22, so the page carries a current rulebook and a much older results trail side by side. A diaspora family should treat the 2025-26 guideline as the shape of the scheme and wait for the Indian mission or consulate to announce the next window.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

Citizenship decides this application before any marksheet is opened. The programme is built for a foreign national holding a valid passport, and an admission negotiated directly with a college instead of through the portal is not a Study in India admission at all, however good the college.

Entry level then follows the ordinary Indian structure. A bachelor's degree needs 10+2 schooling and runs three years in science, commerce and arts, four in agriculture, engineering and technology and pharmacy, and five in architecture; a master's needs a completed bachelor's degree in the discipline; a PhD needs a postgraduate degree, per the portal's eligibility page. Past that point each institute sets its own academic bar and its own English requirement, and English is the medium of instruction across partner institutes.

The line that decides the NRI question is published twice, in the same words. It sits at the foot of that eligibility page, below the entry-level sections, and again as the fourth question in the FAQ's Admissions block: NRIs are now eligible to apply for the Study in India programme, however they will not be eligible for the SII Scholarship, as the FAQ words it. An NRI can therefore register, fill choices and take a seat. The merit award the Ministry attaches to the programme is closed to them, though the institute-level fee waiver is a separate decision the institute still makes on its own.

For Overseas Citizen of India cardholders the portal publishes no rule at all. The note it does publish names NRIs and only NRIs, and SII has not written a second line covering OCI holders, so an OCI applicant's binding answer has to come from the institute and the SII helpdesk rather than from anything quotable on the site. Reading the NRI note as though it covered OCI cardholders would be an inference, not a rule, and this page does not make it. The scheme actually designed for a child of Indian-origin parents abroad sits under a different ministry: the Ministry of External Affairs' Scholarship Programme for Diaspora Children.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

myScheme prints nothing in the exclusions field for this programme, so the disqualifiers have to be picked out of the portal's own course and admission rules. Three of them end an application.

Undergraduate medicine is the first. There are no medical courses under Study in India, and a student may take pharmacy, nursing, medical laboratory technology or physiotherapy but not MBBS, as the FAQ answers it. The second is the route itself: an admission arranged outside the portal never generates the SII student ID, and that ID is what both admission and visa issuance run on. The third applies only to the money, and it is the one bar in the programme that separates who may enrol from who may be funded, because registration is open to NRIs and the SII Scholarship is not.

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Nothing renews centrally here, because the money is not central. A fee waiver belongs to the partner institute that granted it, the portal neither publishes nor standardises how those institutes treat later years, and the FAQ sends the question of further concessions on fees straight back to the institute at the time of admission, in the costs and fees answers.

The diaspora scheme is the opposite, with a continuation rule written down and graded. An SPDC award runs for the whole undergraduate course, and each year's amount is set by the previous year's result. A student with 50% and above in aggregate and clear pass marks in every subject draws the full admissible scholarship again; one who passes every subject but finishes under 50% in aggregate draws 90% of it; one promoted to the next year without a clear pass in every subject draws 50%; and a student not promoted at all receives nothing further, under the 2025-26 SPDC guidelines.

What carries forward on the SII side is the immigration file rather than the funding. A student visa is issued for up to five years or the duration of the course, whichever is less, and can be extended from inside India through e-FRRO without an office visit unless the authorities specifically call the student in, per the portal's visa and FRRO page.

What you get

Award & benefits

The programme's financial help is not a stipend and does not come from the Ministry. It comes from the partner institute, as a tuition concession set on the student's previous academic record, and the institute decides both whether to give one and how large it is.

Then there is the SII Scholarship, and the Government of India does not tell one story about it. The About Us page states flatly that Study in India does not offer any scholarship, and the myScheme record repeats that no direct scholarship is provided by the programme. Against that, the eligibility page and the FAQ both bar NRIs from an SII Scholarship, the Onboarding and FRRO page says the dashboard reports the financial assistance awarded as a Study in India Scholarship or fee waiver, and the Ministry of Education told the Rajya Sabha that an examination called PRAGATII is conducted to offer Study in India Scholarships to meritorious students, in a written reply on 27 July 2022. Both readings sit on government pages and neither has been withdrawn, so this page reports the conflict instead of picking a winner. No value for that award is published anywhere on the portal.

Living costs sit outside all of it. The portal's own budgeting answer puts the average living cost for an international student in India at approximately $400 a month excluding tuition, and breaks that into accommodation, food and housekeeping, transport, personal expenses, laundry, stationery and mobile, in the costs and fees section of the FAQ. Nothing in the programme reimburses it.

The diaspora route is the only one of the three an Indian-origin family abroad can actually plan around, so its terms are worth stating in the Ministry's own units. The Ministry of External Affairs offers 150 SPDC scholarships a year to children of NRIs, PIOs and OCI cardholders and to children of Indian workers in Emigration Check Required countries, with 50% of the slots in every category earmarked for female students. It publishes the money in US dollars: 75% of the total institutional economic cost, which covers tuition, hostel and other institutional charges but excludes food, subject to a maximum of US$4,000 per annum, under the 2025-26 guidelines. Those are the Ministry's published figures, not a conversion made here. Applicants must be 17 to 21 years old, must have passed grades 11 and 12 abroad, and must have secured at least 60% in aggregate.

• Single Centralized Admission Platform: One portal for registration, course search, application submission, visa and FRRO processes.
• Access to Quality Institutions: Admission to NAAC-accredited, NIRF-ranked, autonomous, and globally ranked institutions.
• Unique Study in India Student ID
• Mandatory unique ID generated at registration.
• Required for admission and visa issuance.
• Wide Range of Courses
• Access to 8,000+ courses including Engineering, Management, Science, Humanities, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Yoga, Buddhist Studies, and Vocational Courses.
• Ability to apply to multiple institutions simultaneously and receive multiple offer letters.
• Financial Assistance through Institutes
• Tuition fee waivers ranging from 10% to 100%, subject to institute discretion.
• No direct scholarship is provided by the Study in India Programme.
• Visa and Immigration Support
• Assistance through coordination with Indian Embassies and High Commissions.
• 24×7 Student Support
• Continuous support through toll-free contact center, email, and social media.

What to prepare

Documents required

The record's document list covers the admission side, from the passport through to the offer letter the portal issues. What SII adds is the sequence, and the one detail that decides whether an upload survives review: where a foreign grading system does not map onto the Indian one, students are told to run their marks through the portal's grade conversion reference before submitting rather than after a rejection, as the registration answers explain.

The application itself is filled in three sections. Basic information takes parent, address and passport details; academic information takes the academic record plus scores from additional exams such as GRE, GMAT, SAT, JEE Main and Advanced, TOEFL or IELTS, together with the uploads that support them; choice filling is the third section and only opens when the portal opens it.

The visa document set is a later list, and SII prints it twice without the two versions matching. The FAQ asks for a passport valid for the course duration, passport-size photographs, a photocopy of the passport, proof of residential address, a printed copy of the filled online form, the formal admission letter, printed proof of fees paid to the institute, details of the university and a bank statement, in the visa regulation answers. The Onboarding and FRRO page prints the same list with the fee proof absent and the passport requirement written as six-month validity instead, under its visa regulations heading. Both add that requirements differ by country and that the nearest Indian mission is the authority to confirm with, so the safer preparation is the longer list.

Step by step

How to apply

Six steps, in a fixed order, and the portal numbers them on its front page: register and get the SII ID, explore courses, submit the application, get offer letters, apply for the student visa or student e-visa, then register for e-FRRO after landing, as the home page lays them out. The SII ID is generated at registration and is compulsory, since it is what tracks a foreign student through admission, visa and FRRO.

Choice filling has a floor and no ceiling. A student must enter a minimum of three institute preferences, there is no upper limit on how many more, only one offer letter can be accepted at a time, and the allotment made at counselling follows the order those preferences were ranked in, as the choice filling answer states. The visa is a separate application on indianvisaonline.gov.in, made with the SII ID and the offer letter once a seat is confirmed, and registration with the FRRO is due within 14 days of first arrival in India.

Tracking runs on the student dashboard and nowhere else, and the portal is specific about what appears there: the allotted institute, discipline, qualification, programme level, specialisation, the partner institute scholarship, the institute action status and the visa status. When the institute action status reads pending, SII has already shared the file with the institutes and only the institute can move it, which it does after checking the uploaded documents. Students are told to watch the dashboard and their registered email address regularly, because that is where the result and any update are posted, per the portal's visa and FRRO page.

How winners are picked

Selection process

Allotment is institute-driven, not portal-driven. SII shares the application with the institutes a student has chosen and each one accepts or rejects on the documents uploaded. A student who receives no allotment from any institute, or is rejected in the first round, goes into a second round of counselling, which helps only if the next institute on the preference list is still taking students for that course, as the admissions answers set out. Once an institute has been allotted it cannot be changed; the course inside it sometimes can, but only if that institute permits.

The merit test behind the SII Scholarship is a separate exercise from admission. PRAGATII, the Performance Rating of Applicants through Global Aptitude Test for Indian Institutions, is the examination the Ministry of Education named in Parliament as the one conducted to offer Study in India Scholarships to meritorious students, in the July 2022 Rajya Sabha reply. Neither the About Us page, the eligibility page nor the FAQ mentions PRAGATII, and no date, syllabus or result for it is published on the portal.

SPDC selects on a different principle again. Its guidelines run it on merit-cum-means, so where two applicants secure equal marks the award goes to the one from the lower-income family, and a selection committee draws up the list of awardees in each category with its decision made final and binding.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

An application creates no entitlement on either side of this programme. SII notes that applying on the Study in India portal does not guarantee a student visa, which stays subject to approval under prevailing Indian law, and the SPDC guidelines say the same about their own award, that merely applying does not guarantee any scholarship or admission in any institution.

Two conditions catch students after arrival rather than before. India does not grant a work visa on the strength of an Indian degree once the course ends, and a student visa carries no medical insurance, though some institutes arrange cover for their international students and the portal advises every one of them to hold a policy, as the visa regulation answers state.

On the diaspora scheme the income condition is enforceable rather than advisory. Total household monthly income of the parents must not exceed the equivalent of US$5,000 for the NRI, PIO and OCI categories and US$3,000 for children of Indian workers in ECR countries, and where that information is later found to be incorrect the guidelines say the scholarship is revoked, the amount already disbursed is recovered, and legal action may be initiated, under the SPDC eligibility conditions. SPDC also refuses to stack: an applicant already drawing a scholarship or financial assistance under any other scheme sponsored or funded by a state or central government is not eligible, and applicant and parents both sign a declaration to that effect.

Get help

Contact

The Study in India helpdesk publishes one phone line and one mailbox, and the callback form on its contact page carries both: +91 120-6565065 and help.studyinindia@gov.in. The programme office is listed at the Ministry of Education, New Delhi. The FAQ adds a second address for reaching the Study in India project officers, studyinindia@iitm.ac.in, and describes the same phone line as toll-free, in its programme answers.

SPDC queries do not come here at all. The application goes to the Indian Embassy, High Commission or Consulate in the applicant's country of residence, and the guidelines name so1oia2@mea.gov.in both for clarifications and for a shortlisted candidate's written consent.

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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