PMO steps in as Modi government's scholarship portal faces glitch

NEW DELHI: Modi government’s National Scholarship Portal (NSP) launched last July to credit all scholarships directly into the beneficiary’s account is facing serious challenges prompting the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to step in.

A Group of Secretaries (GoS) comprising 13 top officers from various ministries and headed by secretary ( coordination ) , Cabinet Secretariat, has been set up on March 23 to harmonise the format of all scholarship schemes administered by ministries and integrate them with the new NSP.

The GoS will recommend how all ministries will re-engineer their schemes and obtain necessary approvals from Cabinet by May 2016. The new NSP will be rolled out in 3 states on a trial basis by June and all schemes will be brought under its ambit by August. Secretaries of DeItY, labour, HRD, minority affairs, tribal affairs, disability affairs, science & tech and expenditure are part of the GoS.

At a Committee of Secretaries meeting chaired by Cabinet Secretary PK Sinha in January this year, the minutes accessed by ET note that NSP portal faced many challenges in organisational structure, architecture and workflow mechanism. It was noted the verification of applicants of scholarships required a manual intervention at multiple levels, while there was no system to check and validate information at the submission level in NSP portal. A need was hence felt to ensure scholarship schemes to be standardised across the board.