Although she was in line for the Central government’s INSPIRE scholarship worth ₹80,000 per year, the Lady Shri Ram student who died by suicide last week, and whose family faced financial stress, was yet to see a single paisa of that money despite being almost halfway through her second year. However, the Department of Science and Technology says scholarship money is not paid in the first year to prevent drop outs from benefiting.
Delays built into the system mean that the LSR student may not have received any money for another six months. Surveys suggest that scholarship and research stipend delays have also been further exacerbated by the lockdown.
There is no backlog from the DST’s end in disbursing the INSPIRE scholarship, according to DST Secretary Ashutosh Sharma. He said the Ministry annually funds 10-12,000 science students via the Innovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired Research (INSPIRE) scheme, whereby the top 2% of graduates from State school boards are given a scholarship to pursue degrees in basic sciences.
Potential awardees get money from the second year onwards depending on maintaining a certain threshold of marks in the first year. “The money is disbursed after the first year because it often happens that students change streams in the first year,” Mr. Sharma told The Hindu.
The DST had made the LSR student a ‘provisional’ offer for the 2019 batch and given time until December to upload relevant documents including the first year marksheet, and a performance report signed by the college principal. According to the FAQ on the INSPIRE website, “it usually takes 3-4 months to release the scholarship after the approval of relevant documents or sanction instalment notification on webportal. If you have NOT received the scholarship even after five months of approval of relevant documents, please write to [the Ministry],” indicating that even if the LSR student had sent in her application by December, she may not have received any money until she had finished her second year.
In a note found after she died, she had allegedly written, “Please ensure that INSPIRE scholarship is available for at least a year.”
“In general, there are no delays in INSPIRE disbursal as it directly goes into student accounts but there have been instances when colleges delay submitting documents such as utilisation certificate,” said Mr. Sharma.
“The student has not approached the college regarding this. There is nothing in our records showing any application from her,” said LSR principal Suman Sharma. She said the student had maintained a grade point average of about 8 out of 10, well above the 60% requirement for continuation of the scholarship.
“It is hard enough to collect all the documents and signatures needed for scholarship requirements during normal times. During a pandemic, while not present on campus, it is even more difficult for students, especially those who do not have access to laptops and high speed Internet,” said Alamu R, a Ph.D. scholar at the Centre for Political Studies in the Jawaharlal Nehru University, who had written a report on the travails of research scholars during the pandemic last month.
The report, written jointly with two other Ph.D. students, was based on a July survey of 500 research scholars at the JNU, and showed that two thirds of respondents had not received any stipend money at all since the pandemic began. The situation was worse for non-NET fellows receiving money from the university itself or other sources, with some not receiving money for 18 months. Even for Junior Research Fellows who are supposed to get monthly stipends paid directly into their bank accounts from the University Grants Commission and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, money has not been paid for six months or more, said Ms. Alamu.
“Yes, there has been a problem due to a change in financial procedures, and resultant teething troubles, but I can assure you that all students will get their fellowship funds within the next two to three days,” said UGC member-Secretary Rajnish Jain. However, there is no connection to the pandemic, he said, adding that the UGC had allowed scholarship renewal even without university verification of documents due to the hardship faced by students during the lockdown.
The CSIR was inundated with complaints during the lockdown of delays in payments. “We’ve made more progress but some cases continue to be there. At all levels of government, we are trying to work out a centralised system that can do away with delays at the University or college-end,” said CSIR Director-General Shekhar Mande.
