SC students wait for scholarships from 2013: RTI reply

Siddharth Prabhakar| TNN | Updated: Nov 7, 2017, 00:16 IST

Chennai: In a move that has affected thousands of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (SC/ST) students pursuing higher education, the Tamil Nadu government has stopped giving them post-matric to take up distance education courses offered by state universities for the past five years.

The Centre-sponsored scholarship provides financial assistance to SC/ST students to enable them to complete education.

The issue came to light when the Tamil Nadu Information Commission (TNIC) heard an appeal filed by an RTI applicant from Trichy, who was pursuing MBA in Periyar University via distance mode. He had applied for scholarship to be sanctioned by the Adi Dravidar and Tribal Welfare Department, but did not receive the amounts due for 2013-14 and 2014-15. A later RTI filed with the department did not elicit any response, based on which he filed the second appeal with TNIC.

During the hearing in October, the department informed TNIC that around 50,000 applications from students of various universities were pending since 2012-13 and many universities had written regarding release of the dues. The public information officer of Adi Dravidar department told TNIC that 'the guidance of government had been sought for procedural difficulties'.

Prinicipal secretary of the department, K Manivasan IAS, told TOI that as per existing rules, distance education students were not eligible for the scholarship.

Enquiries by TOI revealed that the state government had not cleared the PM scholarship dues of University of Madras since 2010-11. For Annamalai University, a total of Rs 14.32 crore scholarship amount claimed for 23,000 students had been pending since 2012-13. A similar situation exists in other universities as well.

"We are not even being given user ID and password for uploading data pertaining to eligible students," said a senior official from a university.