Mandatory Aadhaar and One-Time Registration Introduced on National Scholarship Portal from 2024-25 Session

One-time registration, Aadhaar must be applied on the National Scholarship Portal from 2024-25 session. The education ministry has added a feature of grievance redressal to NSP and asked nodal officers to guide students and parents on the application procedure.

The Ministry of Education has made Aadhaar and a newly added feature of One Time Registration (OTR) mandatory for application on the National Scholarship Portal, NSP w.e.f the year 2024-25. The Centre has also issued instructions to the nodal officers to sensitise students and parents regarding how to apply afresh for the National Means-cum-merit Scholarships NMMSS and use another new feature of Grievance Redressal Mechanism GRM on the portal.

Also Read: CAT 2024 Application On Till 13 September 2024, For Those Who Wish To Study Management Courses

One Time Registration (OTR)

An OTR ID is to be issued on successful completion of registration by candidates on NSP, it shall remain valid for the entire academic life-cycle of the student, the department said. As soon as the application is submitted, the system will generate an application ID against the OTR ID. The portal will ensure that at any given instance of time, there is not more than one active application ID against an OTR ID. Upon registration on NSP, the students will get an OTR and password with which they shall be able to apply for or withdraw from a scheme without creating multiple NSP IDs. With the help of the OTR, the student’s entire scholarship history can be traced.

The call also asked state and UT nodal officers, including SNOs, to give the parents, teachers and students orientation on how to register through OTR for fresh and renewal cases, as the NSP hosts various state-level scholarship schemes. “The SNOs were also asked to educate parents on the registration of the correct name and spelling of the child and their parent’s name and details in the school records as well as in the Aadhaar registry to avoid mismatch at a later stage on NSP,” the school department added.

Aadhaar & Complaint Redressal

While apprising the officers about the features of the Aadhaar payment bridge introduced last year, the director of the DBT Mission, Devendra Kumar said that the payment module in the NSP-NIC is triggered after sanity check. Under the scholarship schemes, the school education department makes disbursement of the scholarships directly through DBT into the account of the beneficiaries. The government officials also sought feedback and suggestions on the grievance redressal system from the states and UTs.

Bio-authentication

It has another added facility of application-based bio-authentication for both students and nodal officers. Underscoring that bio-authentication is instead of demographic authentication, the director of UIDAI said that the amount of scholarship is disbursed only to those accounts that are seeded by Aadhaar at the time of registration and the beneficiary can check his or her Aadhaar seeding status from the NPCI and PFMS portals.

NMMSS Eligibility, amount of scholarship, portal

The objective of the scheme is to provide NMMSS scholarships to meritorious EWS students of Class 8 for further studies. MoE sanctions one lakh fresh scholarships to the selected students from Class 9 every year and renews scholarships for those in classes 10, 11 and 12 of the state government, government-aided and local body schools. It is Rs 12, 000 per annum.

The students whose family income from all sources is not more than Rs 3,50,000 per annum are eligible to avail of the scholarships. They must have obtained a minimum of 55% marks or equivalent grade, relaxable by 5% for SC, and ST students, in the Class 7 examination to appear in the selection test for the award of a scholarship conducted by the states/UTs every year. While the students register at NSP, the amount of the scholarship is transferred directly into the bank account of the selected students by DBT via electronic transfer through PFMS.