Widow B.Ed Scheme-Rajasthan(WBEDRJ)

No annual calendar is published for this scheme. The scheme record shows an opening date and no closing date, and the order says only that applications for the second year and later sessions follow a notification the department circulates in due course, with the district nodal officer forwarding verified cases by the date prescribed for that session (scheme guidelines).

In practice the dates reach trainees through the college rather than through any scheme page, and the portal is not a reliable substitute: its standing answer to the last date question has not been refreshed in years and still points at a date from an earlier decade (portal help pages).

Eligibility rests on the current session and on documentary proof of marital status, tested together. The trainee has to be a widow or an abandoned woman, of Rajasthan origin, enrolled in a B.Ed programme at a government or recognised private institution in the state, and studying there when she applies.

Proof of status is the part that decides most cases. A widow establishes it with her husband's death certificate. An abandoned woman establishes it with a certified copy of the divorce papers or decree issued by a competent court or by an authorised Qazi, and the order is explicit that a divorce arrived at by mutual compromise will not be accepted for this purpose (scheme guidelines).

One absence is worth naming, because it changes who should bother applying: neither the departmental order nor the scheme record sets a family income ceiling, and no income certificate appears among the papers the scheme asks for. A widowed trainee is not screened out by what her household earns.

The scheme record publishes no exclusion list, so the bars sit in the order itself, and they are firm (scheme guidelines). A woman who took admission to a B.Ed course in an earlier year and has already earned the B.Ed qualification cannot claim under the scheme, whatever her circumstances now. A divorce settled between the parties on a compromise basis does not establish abandoned status. A trainee already receiving another scholarship or financial assistance is not paid under this scheme as well.

Nothing renews on its own. The order treats each session as a fresh claim: a trainee in the second year of B.Ed, and in later sessions, has to apply online again under the notification the department circulates for that session (scheme guidelines). Attendance and the bar on holding a second scholarship are re-tested with each application rather than settled once.

The college carries an annual step of its own that trainees feel directly. Course mapping on the scholarship portal has to be repeated at the start of every academic year, and until the parent body approves that mapping, students cannot see the college name while filling the form (affiliated college manual).

The benefit is one thing only: reimbursement of the fee payable for the B.Ed course by widowed and abandoned women admitted to teacher training institutions in the state (scheme guidelines). There is no maintenance stipend, no hostel or book component and no second instalment for anything else. The scheme record fixes a single rupee figure rather than a per college amount, so a trainee at a private institution charging more than that figure would still carry the balance herself.

Where the money lands is decided before any officer looks at the claim. Scholarship schemes on the state portal are delivered on the Bhamashah platform, which is why the portal builds the application from a profile drawn out of the family record and refuses to proceed when the bank account in that profile has not been updated (student manual; portal help pages).

The paperwork that decides this application is not the set of card copies. It is the affidavit. In both the widow case and the abandoned case, the order requires an affidavit on non judicial stamp paper, attested by a notary, which names the applicant, her husband and her father, states the date of her husband's death or the date of the decree in her divorce papers, and says plainly that she has not remarried (scheme guidelines).

The status document goes with it. A widow attaches a self attested copy of the death certificate. Where the divorce comes from an authorised Qazi rather than a court, the order asks additionally for a certificate on stamp paper from two respected persons of the community, attested by a notary, confirming that the divorce took place.

A separate set of requirements sits on the portal side rather than in the order. Before a scheme document can be uploaded at all, the applicant's single sign-on profile has to carry the Jan Aadhaar or Bhamashah family identifier and a usable bank account, because the profile form is filled from that family record and only a few fields are typed by hand (student manual).

The address printed against this scheme in the public record no longer opens an application form. The live route is the Unified Scholarship Portal, reached through a one time single sign-on account with the Rajasthan government, and the portal's own announcement for the Widow/Divorcee (B.Ed) Sambal Scheme names an eMitra kiosk as an equal route for a woman who would rather not do it herself (Rajasthan Scholarship Portal).

The sequence on the portal runs like this:

1. Register for a single sign-on identity, or sign in with an existing one, and choose the Student role.
2. Confirm the name in the family record, then verify a 12 digit Aadhaar number by one time password or fingerprint (student manual).
3. Complete the one time profile and upload the mandatory documents.
4. Open New Application, pick the scheme, fill the scheme form and submit it.

One behaviour of that screen is worth knowing in advance: the portal shows only the schemes the profile qualifies for, so a scheme missing from the list is a statement about the profile rather than a fault in the site. If the B.Ed college itself does not appear, it has either not registered on the portal or its course mapping for the year is still pending, and the portal's help pages tell students to ask the college to sort that out and to allow 3 to 4 days for the parent body to approve it (portal help pages).

Mistakes are correctable, but not by the trainee alone. A submitted form is not freely editable; the college has to raise an objection on it, after which a limited set of fields reopens. A bank account that the portal will not accept is updated at an eMitra kiosk, or the head of the family's account is used instead (portal help pages).

The application number is the only handle a trainee gets on her own file, and it is issued once. On submission the portal returns it in the form SCHOLARSHIP/2016-17/XXXX and sends a message to the mobile number and email in the profile; entering that number with a captcha on the portal's status page returns the current stage of the claim, and the student dashboard lists every application filed from that profile (scholarship application status; student manual). Each time a college or departmental officer acts on the form, the same notification goes out, so silence over a long stretch usually means the form is sitting with someone rather than moving.

Nobody is ranked against anybody here. The order sets up a documentary test instead, carried through a fixed chain of offices in which each one certifies the file the previous one sent before it can move up.

The order also assigns blame in advance, which is unusual enough to plan around. If the form is rejected for a deficiency, the trainee carries that herself, and getting the form forwarded from the college to the district nodal officer is the responsibility of the college and the trainee together rather than of the department.

Attendance is a live condition rather than a one time check. The order fixes a minimum attendance requirement at the concerned college, certified by the institution rather than declared by the applicant, and if she leaves the college after applying, the institution is required to inform the Commissionerate without delay, with the head of the institution answerable for a failure to do so (scheme guidelines). The declaration of no remarriage in the affidavit stands behind the whole claim, so a change in circumstances during the course is a matter for the college and the department, not something to leave unsaid.

The first stop for a case is the nodal officer at the B.Ed college, since that office authenticates and forwards the form and can see where it is stuck. Portal problems, as distinct from scheme problems, go to the scholarship helpdesk at helpdesk.scholarship@rajasthan.gov.in, which colleges are also told to use when a parent body has not registered (affiliated college manual). The helpdesk lists working hours of 10 AM to 6 PM on working days (Rajasthan Scholarship Portal).

The department behind the scheme is the Department of College Education, which the state lists at Block IV, Dr S Radhakrishnan Shiksha Sankul, Jawahar Lal Nehru Marg, Jaipur, and which is reached through the Higher and Technical Education portal that carries both that address and the link to the department's own site (Higher and Technical Education, Rajasthan).