UGC and AICTE have cleared the backlog of scholarships using a special grant of Rs. 250 crore from the HRD Ministry, Union minister Prakash Javadekar said on Wednesday. He also said the government is positive about the demand by research scholars of a hike in the scholarship amount.
“There were repetitive complaints that the scholarships are not being disbursed timely by UGC and AICTE. We issued a special grant of Rs. 250 crore and now the entire backlog has been cleared and from now on the recipients will timely get their fellowships credited,” he told reporters.
“The government spends Rs. 4,000 crore annually for scholarships to nearly 2.5 lakh students. Some of them are the JRF, merit-cum-means-scholarship, Jammu and Kashmir scholarship, GATE scholarship and Ishan Uday scholarship,” Javadekar added.
Meanwhile, a group of researchers met the minister on Wednesday to raise the demand of increasing the scholarship amount for research scholars. “We are positive about it,” he said, without committing on any timeline.
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