Bihar: Post-Matric, NMMS scholarships late for thousands due to tech glitches, manpower shortage

NEW DELHI: In Bihar, for a rural student to apply for a Pre-Matric Scholarship or a Post-Matric Scholarship, a few things have to go their way. Information on all documents and online records should match, the Bihar government’s Medhasoft portal should be glitch-free, the students should have Android smartphones, and, ideally, they should have no siblings.

Because the Medhasoft portal, which is used by the government to store all information about students and schools, accepts only one application from one phone number. In most rural areas of Bihar, entire families share one phone. So, if your siblings have already applied for a scholarship, you can’t.

“Every student will have a unique user id, then they apply. For that you need to have OTP verification and for that you need Android phones. In Bihar, in some areas, entire families have one phone. Also, only one registration is possible from one mobile number. If a family has four children then they can only register one. Then the rest of them won’t be able to apply for scholarships,” said a programme manager of a non-profit, asking not to be named.

But even if you are a single child, there is no guarantee you’ll be able to access scholarships. For the National Means cum Merit Scholarship (NMMS or NMCM scholarship), the portal offers no correction feature. That means if there is even a slight error in the application, one cannot apply again for the entire year. The Pre-Matric Scholarship fetches Rs 3,500 per annum and for NMMS scholarship, Rs 12,000 per annum.

“The portal doesn’t function at all at times. There are many errors, the website is very slow, and applications aren’t saved. Even if applications are saved, the government currently doesn’t have the resources to verify all those applications… two to three crore applications are filed every year, lakhs of students are affected by this,” they said. The non-profit works with the Bihar government on various schemes.

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Many students, mostly in rural areas, are unable to avail Bihar scholarships due to persistent software issues, varied and inconsistent document requirements, lack of proper mechanisms for redress and a lack of manpower at the block level, said activists working with underprivileged children in the districts of Patna and Kishanganj. One non-profit helped 1,200 students apply for the Post-Matric Scholarship 2023 but their applications are yet to be verified.

In consequence, some organisations, such as the Azad India Foundation, have given up helping students with central government scholarships, choosing, instead, to focus on the few state-run ones. Others have given up completely.

Medhasoft portal and Bihar scholarships

The online process itself is a barrier. “It is great that we are moving towards a paper-free system but there should also be systems and mechanisms before we move there. For instance, in remote rural areas there is no internet. They have to find an internet cafe, and see somebody to help them to download the form. It takes forever,” said Beena Pallickal of National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR).

Moreover, all it takes is a minor error on the PMS and NMMS scholarship portal for the application to be rejected. The most common cause of rejection is the mismatch in names or details in different documents.

“Now, everything is online. You have to upload your documents, your Aadhar card should match your certificate, your name should match with the name in the register, there are so many issues. Although this can be rectified by those people who are able to avail the facility, the poor are unable to do so. Most of the students are first-generation learners and they don’t have the support of their families,” said Yuman Hussain of Azad India Foundation.

NMMS, PMS Scholarships: No clarity on documents

There’s also a lack of clarity on what documents to submit. The state government sometimes asks for additional documents during verification.

“No guidelines say that there is a need for so many documents. But at the time of verification, they ask us to submit all these documents. Once the student has already applied for a scholarship, it will take them time to bring the extra documents but by then the verification time will be over. There are 8-10 documents. Academic documents, caste certificates, Aadhar, income certificates. Sometimes they ask for PAN card also,” said the Patna-based programme manager.

Then, there are delays at the institutional level. The government expects schools to upload details of students which are then cross-verified during application verification. If the school does not upload the details in time, that poses another problem. The timelines for verification are not clearly established and wildly elastic with some departments taking years.

“The government should see what the roadblocks are and find a way to overcome them. There should be options for both online and offline form submission. Making everything digitised without having alternate mechanisms in place can be counterproductive to the whole idea of ensuring access to scholarships,” said Pallickal.

Delays in verification of scholarship applications

Some said that these issues persisted pre-digitisation also. Currently, in Bihar, there is no single department in charge of scholarships. The responsibility for verifying the documents are given to different departments each year.

“Every year it is a different department. One year it was MOMA [Ministry of Minority Affairs], next year it was another department of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe, and they have limited resources because they have other work to do. The district nodal officers are not just tasked with scholarships but with overseeing other developments as well. The number of scholarship applications is so huge that this is a full time job for someone,” said the programme manager.

“Due to resource crunch, the state is unable to verify all the applications. Now the verifications are going on in many areas. It has been over a year. Slowly, as the verification process gets done, they release the scholarships,” they said.

Moreover, the verifications happen at the district level rather than at the block level. Activists also said that the government is not very receptive to follow-ups and take their own time to release the scholarships. Some organisations have already taken a backseat in helping students with scholarships.

“When you look at the block level, there are 50,000 applications. Verifying all these applications within a month is not humanly possible. So, there should be a system at the block level through which verifications can happen. We had tried many times to follow up on this but the government works at its own pace,” the programme manager said.

“They just dismiss giving excuses. They don’t even entertain certain complaints…We are frustrated. Because this takes up so much time and effort. Moreover, the government doesn’t entertain us. Then we think, why are we doing this at all? We have also stopped trying…There is a lack of political will in ensuring that the scholarships are released. The change can only come from government action, ” they said.