The Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment had launched a scholarship scheme to help MPhil and PhD scholars from OBC groups in 2014. But there is an increasing delay in stipends, and students allege that complaints to the ministry have failed to solve the problem.
The National Fellowship for Other Backward Classes, or the NF-OBC, annually takes in 1,000 new scholars who have qualified the University Grants Commission’s Junior Research Fellowship. About 75 percent of these have to be from the social sciences background while the rest have to be science scholars.
