Union Minister for Tourism, Culture and Northeast region development G. Kishan Reddy has sought the "immediate intervention" of Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao in implementing the post-matric SC/ST scholarships in Telangana for the benefit of poor students on Tuesday.
In yet another official communication to the Chief Minister, a copy of which was released to the media, the Union Minister has "earnestly requested" the Chief Minister to release the amount due from the State side since close to two lakh students had applied for the same during this academic year.
The Centre had already transferred ₹245 crore (as 60% contribution) to TS for the scholarships, said Mr. Kishan Reddy. He explained that the Union Cabinet under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has approved a large-scale revamp of the Post Matric Scholarships for Scheduled Caste (PMS-SC) to ensure timely payment of scholarships by enabling ‘transparency, regularity and accountability’.
The new scheme has raised the Centre's contribution to 60%, a near five times increase to ensure that the focus was on the poor students, technology is used for preventing any fraud and a Direct benefit transfer (DBT) to students avoiding all intermediaries. It was also to ensure there were no delays with proper timelines maintained and high academic quality in the educational institutions.
The aim of these scholarships was to support the students throughout the academic year in meeting expenses such as course books, hostel fees and other miscellaneous expenses, said the Minister. It would enable students to solely focus on learning and 'free themselves' from the mental stress arising from a lack of financial means.
Therefore, it was imperative that these scholarships are released to students at the earliest and not after the academic year. However, the TS government has not released this amount to the eligible students and was yet to complete the process of verification and uploading the data of the students on the portal for the transfer of scholarship money using DBT, said the Union Minister.
The scheme provides far-reaching benefits for the SC/ST students and considering the ongoing pandemic's economic challenges to the society at large, a speedy clearance of the pending scholarships would provide some kind of relief to the student parents, he added, in his letter.
