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🇮🇳 India /Culture & Society

Domicile certificates no longer needed for SC, OBC scholarships

From Hindustan Times · () English

Translated from English, summarized and contextualized by DistantNews.

At a glance

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  • The Department of Social Justice and Empowerment has removed the mandatory domicile certificate requirement for students applying for SC and OBC scholarships.
  • This change aims to reduce documentation burdens and improve access for approximately 12 million students who benefit annually from the Pre-Matric and Post-Matric Scholarship Schemes.
  • The department has also launched SETU, a single-window digital platform on UMANG, to streamline all scholarship-related services for students and officials.

Students applying for scholarships for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) will no longer need to provide a domicile certificate, following a significant reform by the Department of Social Justice and Empowerment.

This decision is expected to ease access to the Pre-Matric and Post-Matric Scholarship Schemes for nearly 12 million students who receive benefits each year. Previously, students studying outside their home states faced difficulties in obtaining a domicile certificate, often requiring travel, lost wages for parents, and sometimes involving payments to expedite the process.

Ministry officials stated that the removal of the domicile certificate requirement is intended to reduce the documentation burden, lower compliance costs, and ensure smoother access to scholarship benefits for eligible students. Data suggests a substantial number of students in higher education study outside their home districts, highlighting the impact of this reform.

The scholarship schemes cover a broad range of beneficiaries across various income levels and educational stages, from Class IX to doctoral programs. In the fiscal year 2026, over ₹7,981 crore was disbursed to more than 7.5 million SC beneficiaries alone, underscoring the scale of these direct-benefit education initiatives.

In addition to this documentation reform, the Department has introduced SETU (Scholarship for Educational Transformation and Upliftment) on the UMANG platform. This initiative provides a unified digital solution for all scholarship-related services, consolidating registration, status tracking, and validation processes into a single interface for students, institutional nodal officers, and state officials. State education departments are actively promoting awareness of these changes among students and parents.

The removal of the requirement is aimed at reducing the documentation burden, lowering compliance costs, and enabling smoother access to scholarship benefits for eligible students.

— Senior Ministry officialsExplaining the rationale behind scrapping the mandatory domicile certificate for scholarship applicants.
DistantNews Editorial

Originally published by Hindustan Times in English. Translated, summarized, and contextualized by our editorial team with added local perspective. Read our editorial standards.

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