The Department of Social Justice and Empowerment, under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment (MoSJE), has done away with the mandatory domicile certificate requirement for students applying under the Pre-Matric and Post-Matric Scholarship Schemes for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs). This reform will facilitate access to the approximately 12 million students who receive benefits annually under the two schemes.
Domicile certificate – an official document issued by the state government certifying permanent residency – was until now a mandatory submission under both the schemes. For students studying outside their home states, taking one mid-year means traveling home, losing wages to parents, and in some cases paying teachers to speed up the process.
There are 5.8 million SC students and 14.7 million OBC students enrolled in Indian universities based on the Ministry of Education’s share of 14.2% and 35.8% of the total enrollment of 41.3 million. National Sample and Census Survey data indicate that approximately 30-35% of tertiary students study outside their home region.
“The removal of this requirement aims to reduce the burden of documentation, lower compliance costs, and enable smoother access to scholarship benefits for eligible students,” senior ministry officials said.
The two schemes cover a broad base of beneficiaries across income groups. The Pre-Matric Scholarship for SC Students covers 9th and 10th grade students whose parental income is up to $2.5 lakh per annum, while the post-graduate scholarship extends to higher education up to PhD level. For OBC students, separate pre-Matric and post-Matric programs operate with an income ceiling of $2.5 lakh and $1 lakh per annum respectively, covering courses from higher secondary and ITI programs to postgraduate and professional degrees. In FY26, it ended $Rs 7,981 crore has been disbursed to over 7.5 million SC beneficiaries alone under these programmes, making them among the largest direct benefit education schemes in the country.
Besides the documentation reform, the ministry launched SETU – Scholarship for Educational Transformation and Upgrading – on the UMANG platform as a single-window digital solution for all scholarship-related services. The platform provides a unified interface for students, institutional nodal officers, district nodal officers and state officials to register applications, track status and perform validation checks, consolidating functions previously deployed across separate channels. State education departments have begun guiding schools to ensure awareness. The Punjab School Education Department has issued official directions to district education officials to guide maximum communication between students and parents.
“These initiatives are consistent with the government’s broader goal of promoting inclusion, reducing procedural barriers and ensuring effective implementation of social welfare schemes,” the ministry said.
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