Strict guidelines, including Aadhar verification made mandatory for scholarships to pre and post-matric students

With irregularities were reported during last year, the Tamil Nadu government has decided to impose strict rules including making Aadhar verification mandatory for the first time in implementing scholarship schemes for minority students in 2021-2022.

Every year the government implements three scholarship schemes such as pre-matric, post-matric, and free education to enable the poor students of backward classes, most backward classes, and denotified communities to continue their education without interruption.

A senior official from the School Education Department said that as scholarship schemes for the students belonging to minority communities are the major stakeholders in the National Scholarship Portal (NSP), which covers all government, government-aided and private schools, will open the website soon for the year 2020-21.

"During last year, the government had taken various preventive measures against modus operandi which were adopted by unscrupulous elements in collusion with some institution authorities and officials to defraud the beneficiaries under the scholarship scheme", he pointed out.

He said in order to curb out the possibilities of verification of fake applications, it was decided by strictly enforcing Aadhar authentication verification of head of institution's profile details through Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) electronically.

Stating that in Tamil Nadu a total of 61,197 institutions were enrolled in the scheme, he said more than 3 lakh students from both pre and post-matric categories will be benefited. Accordingly, the government will be spending about Rs 100 crore for both the scholarships and besides free education scheme.

The official also said all the chief educational officers across all the districts were instructed to complete the mandatory Aadhar verification at the institution level within 20 days. "They were also informed that the Aadhar verification will be done only through UIDAI electronically", he added.

"Unless the new guidelines are followed, implementation of scholarship schemes for 2021-2022 will be stumbled in our state and the scholarship applications, registered by the economically and educationally weaker minority students, could not be processed".