Tablet Assistance to Scheduled Caste Students of 12th Standard(TASCS12S)

Overview

About TASCS12S

Tablet assistance to Scheduled Caste students of 12th standard is not the scheme that hands over the device. The tablet came from the education department against a token fee, and this scheme, which the Director of Scheduled Caste Welfare numbers BCK-353, was set up to return that token fee to the Scheduled Caste student who paid it. The claim follows the tablet rather than replacing it, and it now carries a date: the directorate's Digital Gujarat guideline for 2025-2026 is the latest to list it, and the guideline for 2026-2027 does not.

The Director of Scheduled Caste Welfare, under Gujarat's Social Justice and Empowerment Department, lists this as BCK-353 on a scheme page that is still online, and states the assistance in one line: Rs 1000 Assistance, for a student who has already received a tablet with a token fee of Rs.1000 from the education department, with no income limit attached. The heading the directorate files it under states the intended end result rather than the payment: Tablet free of cost to students of scheduled caste 12 students. The page names the District Deputy Director (SCW) Office as the implementing office and Digital Gujarat as the online route, shows one resolution, SSP/102014/NB347/A1 dated 16-01-2019, and gives no year of operation (Director, Scheduled Caste Welfare, BCK-353).

The year is in the directorate's annual guideline for Scheduled Caste students applying on Digital Gujarat, and that is where the scheme's record runs out. The 2025-2026 edition carries it as the eighth and last row of its scheme table, Tablet Assistance to SC Students (BCK-353), with no income limit, open to boys and girls, returning the token to a student who paid it for the education department's tablet (SC guideline 2025-2026, Director of Scheduled Caste Welfare). The 2026-2027 edition, written for the window the portal opened to Scheduled Caste and OBC students from 06/07/2026 to 30/09/2026, gives its eighth row to private tuition coaching for science-stream students and mentions neither the tablet nor BCK-353 anywhere in its pages (SC guideline 2026-2027, Director of Scheduled Caste Welfare; Gujarat State Scholarship Portal). Nor does it say the assistance has ended. As of September 2026, then, the refund was last listed for 2025-2026 and has no row in the 2026-2027 table of schemes the directorate runs online, while the scheme page above still describes it without a year.

Two departments were involved in one benefit. The state's Development Programme for 2023-24 described students of standard 12 from the Scheduled Caste and Socially and Educationally Backward Class groups as being provided a tablet free of cost in cooperation with the education department (Government of Gujarat, Development Programme 2023-24). Free of cost was the end state, not the starting point: the education department collected the token amount when the device was issued, and the welfare directorate was the office that put the money back. The device this claim depends on has a thin paper trail of its own, one NAMO e-TAB government resolution on the Directorate of Technical Education's page, dated 01/11/2021 (Directorate of Technical Education). The Indian Express reported in June 2023 that it had spoken to students who paid the token amount at the start of earlier academic sessions and were close to finishing their degree and diploma courses without having received a tablet, and a student left in that position had nothing to file under this scheme, whose first condition is a device already in hand (Indian Express, June 2023).

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

BCK-353 carries no calendar of its own: the scheme page publishes neither an opening nor a closing date, and both date fields sit empty in the scheme record. It rode on the directorate's yearly Digital Gujarat window for Scheduled Caste applications, which the 2025-2026 guideline, the last to list the tablet row, set from the middle of July to the end of August 2025, with standing advice not to wait for the last date (SC guideline 2025-2026). The scholarship portal later reopened the 2025-2026 post-matric forms for Scheduled Caste students who had missed that window, from 19/08/2026 to 02/09/2026, in a notice that names no individual scheme (Gujarat State Scholarship Portal).

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The scheme page's eligibility test for BCK-353 has three parts, and the standard the student is sitting in is not one of them. It asks that the student belong to the Scheduled Castes, that the student has already received a tablet with a token fee of Rs.1000 from the education department, and against income it records No Income Limit (Director, Scheduled Caste Welfare, BCK-353). The 12th standard lives in the scheme's name and in the scheme record's own eligibility line, not in the directorate's three-part test. The directorate's 2025-2026 guideline, the last to carry the tablet row, adds one fact neither of those carries, that the assistance was open to boys and girls alike (SC guideline 2025-2026).

The step that came first was governed by a different test. Knowledge Consortium of Gujarat, which holds the education department's page for the device, opened it to a student who had cleared the 12th examination from a recognised institution and board in Gujarat and had moved on into the first year of college, counting polytechnic entrants in, on a page last updated in 2018 (Knowledge Consortium of Gujarat). The two descriptions therefore met the same student at two moments, the welfare directorate naming the standard the tablet was earned in and the education department naming the year it was handed over in, which is why the claim was filed after the device had changed hands and never before.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

The scheme page publishes no exclusion list. What the directorate did rule out, in the 2025-2026 guideline that listed the tablet claim, sits in its general instructions: a student who fills in wrong information or hides information is not allowed to fill the scholarship form again, one who tries to obtain a scholarship by hiding information is blacklisted, students are asked not to attempt a duplicate application, and an application that was never finally submitted, or whose printout never reached the school or college with all its documents, is not taken into consideration (SC guideline 2025-2026). For 2026-2027 the question comes before any of these, because that year's guideline has no tablet row to apply under (SC guideline 2026-2027).

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Nothing in the scheme record or on the directorate's page sets a renewal condition, which fits a benefit that attaches once to one device. The automatic Renewal mode in the 2025-2026 guideline, which reopens the form for a student who applied the year before and was paid under the rules and asks for the registration, bank, academic and disability details to be checked and fresh attachments uploaded, serves students continuing on a scholarship, not a one-off return of a token (SC guideline 2025-2026). With no tablet row in the 2026-2027 guideline, there is no listed claim for that year to renew or to file fresh (SC guideline 2026-2027).

What you get

Award & benefits

The benefit was the token fee, returned. Where the scheme page states an amount, the directorate's 2025-2026 guideline states a direction: a Scheduled Caste student who obtained a tablet by paying the token amount under the education department's tablet scheme gets that amount back under this scheme (SC guideline 2025-2026). Nothing in that entitlement was scaled by marks, by course or by family income.

Where the money was to land was worth checking before the form was filled. The 2025-2026 guideline told every student to get the bank account seeded with the Aadhaar number without delay, since the central post-matric scholarship is paid into the Aadhaar-linked account, to make sure the bank's KYC was complete, and warned that a dormant or inoperative account cannot take the credit and that money credited to a wrong account number entered by the student is the student's own responsibility (SC guideline 2025-2026).

• Under the scheme, students in the 12th standard belonging to the Scheduled Caste category will receive a tablet by paying a token fee of ₹1,000/-.

What to prepare

Documents required

Beyond the list the scheme record carries, the directorate's 2025-2026 guideline is specific about the form each paper takes. Under it no scholarship is paid offline, and the account proof it accepts is a passbook front page or, without a passbook, a cancelled cheque, carrying the new bank's IFSC and number where banks have merged. The affidavit for a break in study is not a formality: it has to state that during the gap after standard 10 no course was pursued and no scholarship was drawn. A married girl student adds the marriage certificate, a student with a disability adds the certificate from the competent authority, and every paper is scanned from the original, with a copy accepted only where the original cannot be had (SC guideline 2025-2026).

Step by step

How to apply

For 2025-2026, the last year its guideline listed the tablet row, the claim ran on the Digital Gujarat portal, and finding the right corner of it was most of the task. Registration came first, as a new Citizen, with an email ID, a mobile number and a password the student sets. A student who already held a profile did not register again, and that year's guideline named applying for a tablet as one of the reasons a profile might already exist; the 2026-2027 edition drops the tablet from that sentence (SC guideline 2025-2026; SC guideline 2026-2027). Everything after login ran through one door. The directorate said a student cannot apply to a scholarship scheme from any other part of the portal: Scholarship Services under the Services menu came first, then Request a New Service, the year in Select Financial Year, and BCK-353 from the schemes grouped under the (Director Scheduled Caste Welfare) heading (SC guideline 2025-2026).

Once BCK-353 was picked and its form and uploads were complete, Verify Mobile Number sent an OTP, and Confirm & Final Submit moved the application into the linked school or college login, after which the student could no longer edit it; a correction meant the institution sending the application back, or the student pulling it back through the Withdraw option while the institution had not yet acted on it. The last step was offline: the student printed the application, attached the supporting documents and deposited it at the school, college or institution (SC guideline 2025-2026).

Tracking it afterwards was a matter of knowing which desk held it. Logging in as a Citizen on Digital Gujarat opens the profile page, which lists the services the applicant has taken (Digital Gujarat Citizen User Manual). A finally submitted application had already left the student's hands and sat in the linked school or college login, so the first question was whether the printout and its documents had been deposited there, since the directorate did not consider one that was not. Where the sanction was done and the credit had not landed, the account faults the guideline itself warns about were the ones to rule out, a dormant account and one not seeded with Aadhaar. For portal faults the guideline gives the Digital Gujarat help desk on 18002335500, and a student whose registered mobile number is lost or closed gets it changed at the district SC, ST and OBC office rather than online (SC guideline 2025-2026).

How winners are picked

Selection process

Neither the scheme page nor the 2025-2026 guideline publishes a merit list, ranking, cut-off or quota for this claim. The filter was the tablet itself: the scheme page limits the claim to a Scheduled Caste student who has already taken the device against the token payment, so the narrowing was done upstream, by the education department's own test of who was issued a device. What remained was verification, by the District Deputy Director (SCW) Office, of an application the school or college had received with its papers (Director, Scheduled Caste Welfare, BCK-353; SC guideline 2025-2026).

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The directorate closes each year's scholarship table with the note that the details there are for guidance and that the final interpretation is to be made as per the government's resolution, which is why the resolution number on the scheme page matters more than any summary of it (SC guideline 2025-2026; SC guideline 2026-2027). Two conditions in the 2025-2026 guideline bit hardest in practice. Information filled in wrongly or withheld cost the student any further scholarship form and, where it was used to try to obtain a scholarship, a blacklisting, not merely a rejected form. And the bank account was the student's responsibility from the moment it was typed in, including a credit that landed in the wrong account because the wrong number was entered (SC guideline 2025-2026).

Get help

Contact

The implementing office the scheme page names is the District Deputy Director (Scheduled Caste Welfare) Office of the student's own district, and the scheme sits with the Director, Scheduled Caste Welfare, Gujarat State, whose office publishes its address as Block number 4, second floor, Dr. Jivraj Mehta Bhavan, Gandhinagar and its telephone as +91 79 23253229 (Director, Scheduled Caste Welfare, BCK-353). With BCK-353 absent from the 2026-2027 guideline, the district office is where to ask about a tablet token paid that year. Portal problems, as opposed to scheme problems, go to the Digital Gujarat help desk on 18002335500, which the scholarship portal also lists, and a change of registered mobile number is made at the district office (Gujarat State Scholarship Portal; SC guideline 2026-2027).

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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