Summer Internship Scheme Of DGFT(SISDGFT)

Applications open through a dated advertisement rather than a standing window, and the month it lands has drifted. The 2024-25 cycle opened on 20 March 2024 and the 2025-26 cycle on 8 April 2025; the 2026 advertisement is dated May 04 and shut inside three weeks.

Two wrinkles in the 2026 paperwork are worth knowing about. The extension notice moved only the application deadline and did not restate the dates that followed it, which leaves the advertised selection date of May 21 sitting three days before the extended closing date of May 24 in the published record. And the advertisement contradicts itself once: the duration clause and the timeline both begin the internship on May 25, 2026, while the No Objection Certificate annexure asks the institute to permit the period May 22 to July 31, 2026. Anyone planning for the next cycle should treat the advertisement date as the trigger and start watching the Directorate's own page from March.

The academic filter is a hard one and it sits at the degree level, not at the marksheet of the current year. A candidate needs a graduation degree carrying at least 60% marks in aggregate, taken from a National School of Law, a Central University, an AICTE-recognised financial or economics institution, a recognised national management institute, a foreign university, or another institution of excellence, per the Summer Internship Programme, 2026 advertisement. Post-graduation is not required but is expressly preferred.

Two things loosened in 2026 that older summaries still carry the old version of. The earlier documents, including the 2025-26 advertisement, required the graduation degree itself to be in Public Policy, Economics, Finance, Management or Law; the 2026 wording sets no subject condition at the graduation stage at all. The list of preferred postgraduate disciplines also grew, adding Foreign Trade, Logistics, Operations Research and Artificial Intelligence to the five that were there before. Nationality is the one thing that never moved: the programme is open to Indian nationals only, whether they are living in India or studying abroad, and a candidate still enrolled in a course must produce a permission letter from their supervisor or head of department at the time of joining.

Read the archived documents back to 2019 and none of them carries a disqualification clause; the 2026 advertisement is the first to write one down, and every item in it is about how you apply rather than who you are. Candidates who do not satisfy the eligibility conditions are told in terms that they need not apply. A candidate may opt for headquarters or for one Regional Authority, never both at once, and only one application per candidate is entertained. Canvassing in any form draws summary rejection. An application that is incomplete, or that arrives without the precis in the prescribed format, is summarily rejected. The advertisement then closes the loop from the other side: mere submission of an application, or fulfilment of every condition in it, confers no right to be selected.

A DGFT internship ends on the date its advertisement gives it and begins again only as a fresh advertisement with fresh dates and, since 2026, a fresh theme. No document in the published archive creates an extension, a second term, or a route back in for someone who has already served. The 2026 cycle fixed its own exit in advance: the closing presentation falls in the last week of July and the engagement concludes on July 31, 2026, with each Regional Authority forwarding its two best ideas to headquarters by August 07, 2026.

This is the part of the listing that has gone out of date, and it matters more than any other line on the page. The Rs 10,000 a month that circulates everywhere is real, but it belongs to the older cycles.

Logistics support at the place of engagement is provided in every cycle, but the 2026 document is explicit that travel, boarding and lodging are the intern's own responsibility. Finishing the term is no longer enough to earn the certificate either: under the 2026 rules it is issued only after the intern delivers the closing presentation and the Head of the Division or Regional Authority evaluates it, and the advertisement states that no certificate will be issued in the absence of that presentation. The best of the ideas presented at headquarters and forwarded by the Regional Authorities are to be suitably rewarded by the Department, per the 2026 advertisement, which does not say what the reward is.

The listed documents are the thin part of the record and the real application is heavier than they suggest. A 2026 applicant had to upload a completed web form, a CV, a precis in PDF, and a self-declaration that the precis was authored by them and not by any artificial intelligence or large language model tool; the permission letter from a supervisor is produced at joining rather than at application, and it applies only to candidates still in a course. Note also that the closing deliverable moved: the older cycles asked for a report or paper submitted to the Head of Division, while 2026 asked for a presentation instead.

An instruction sheet from an older cycle will send you to the wrong door, because the channel has not stayed put. The 2022-23 and 2023-24 cycles took a scanned application and CV by email at internship-dgft@gov.in. The 2024-25 and 2025-26 cycles each published a Google Form link instead, a different one each year. The 2026 cycle kept the form and rebuilt what it asks for: one online web form, again hosted on Google Forms, carrying a drop-down through which the candidate names the place of engagement, headquarters or one of the 24 Regional Authorities. Applications arriving before or after the advertised window are not entertained in any cycle, and from 2026 an incomplete one is rejected outright rather than chased.

Tracking is where expectations need lowering. The 2026 advertisement says offers are communicated to selected candidates by e-mail only, and it publishes no reference number, no shortlist and no merit list, so an applicant's status is an email or silence. The one public page that moves is the Internship Scheme page on dgft.gov.in, where the Directorate posts the live internship document, any extension notice and the downloadable archive for each past cycle, and that page is where the 2026 last date visibly shifted. On the payment side there was nothing to trace in 2026, because there was nothing to pay; in the cycles that did pay, each document names the monthly amount and stops there, with no disbursal mechanism, no timeline for the credit and no grievance route written into it. The myScheme record adds nothing on that front either, carrying no DBT flag and no application link of its own.

Selection in 2026 rested on one document and nothing else. Candidates wrote a precis of 1,500 to 2,000 words on the theme attached to their chosen place of engagement, setting out a problem statement, an analytical approach, recommendations and a short implementation outline, and there was no interview at any stage, per the Summer Internship Programme, 2026 advertisement. A Selection Committee scored it on analytical clarity, originality, policy relevance, feasibility and quality of articulation, its decision was final, and no queries were entertained once the process closed.

One rule in that cycle has real teeth. A precis found to have been generated by an AI or large language model tool draws summary rejection, and summary termination if the intern has already joined. The interview it replaced is a recent casualty rather than an old one: as late as the 2025-26 cycle the sequence ran shortlisting on 28 April 2025, interviews from 2 May to 13 May 2025, and the final list on 15 May 2025. One year later that entire stage had been replaced by a committee reading a document.

A declaration of secrecy is furnished before the internship begins, and a breach of it brings summary termination plus whatever else the law permits. DGFT may end an internship at any time without assigning a reason, and its decision is final; an intern leaving early gives 15 days of prior written notice. The line every applicant should read twice is the employment one, stated in both the older and the current documents: interns are not employees of DGFT, and there is no assurance, express or implied, of future employment with DGFT or with the Government of India.

The Directorate published internship-dgft@gov.in as the application address in its 2023-24 document. The 2026 advertisement is issued from the Directorate General of Foreign Trade at Vanijya Bhawan, New Delhi 110011, and routes the application through the web form rather than an inbox.