Amid complaints of some SC and OBC students that they were not receiving scholarships for the past three years, the State Government has formed a Screening Committee to look into the matters of scholarships in the State. The committee will hold its first meeting in first half of July to streamline post matriculation scholarships, to bring more and more beneficiaries from the State under its umbrella and to keep fraudsters, be it student or institutions, away from snatching benefits of any genuine needy.
Welfare department officials claimed that it was not discriminating at distributing scholarships but its own data evidently showed that the number of ST students who got scholarship has drastically fallen down to around 70,000 in 2015-16 from around 85,000 in 2014-15.
The 6-7 member committee comprising Welfare Department Secretary as Chairman along with education, higher education and health department officials as nominated members will discuss all issues related to scholarship distribution. Detailed minutes of the meeting were under discussion, according to Welfare Department.
The department had disbursed post matriculation scholarships amounting to nearly Rs300 Crores to 27,433 SC, 84,947 ST and 94,222 OBC students from colleges/universities operating in Jharkhand during 2014-15. The next year (2015-16) saw a drastic surge in the number students of OBC category, when department released scholarships for 1,83,100 students, almost double the number of previous year. Similarly, the number of SC students who successfully got scholarship during 2015-16 also increased to 34,567 from previous year number of 27,433. The department released scholarships for total 2,87,252 students in 2015-16 compared to 2,06,602 students in 2014-15.
“The main challenge is not the increasing number of students seeking scholarships, as we have also seen total amount provided for distribution increasing by around 10 per cent yearly from a couple of years. The challenge comes from those colleges mushrooming just to get aid and other benefits from Government and also from the students who get enrolled in private colleges to claim higher scholarship against their course fee then disappear”, said Welfare Department Secretary Rajiv Arun Ekka.
Ekka said that there are more than 3,000 colleges and higher studies institutions operating from Jharkhand, and it is difficult to physically verify each and every college in terms of their curriculum, classroom, student strength and other things.
“We have set criteria for selection of students for scholarship, which is transparent and computerised with its server situated in Hyderabad. This makes it impossible for any change or tempering in system to benefit any specific case. But to check the number of private institutions which just multifold the number of student seeking scholarship, which is also a big problem in a number of other states, we have decided to sit as early as next month with regular meetings thereafter,” said Ekka.