The human resource development ministry has tweaked eligibility rules for its college and university scholarship programme for poor students to help those from school boards that are stingy with marks.
The change, first mooted soon after Kapil Sibal took over the ministry, will come into effect from the coming academic session itself, government officials said today.
Students who score over 80 per cent in their Class XII qualifying examinations are at present eligible for the scholarship.
The ministry doles out 82,000 such scholarships every year, under a programme started in 2008.
Undergraduate students are awarded Rs 1,000 a year as long as they maintain a first division — 60 per cent — throughout the course. Postgraduate students are awarded Rs 2,000 a year during their course.
Only students from families with income less than Rs 4.5 lakh are eligible for the scholarships.
Under the new eligibility criteria, all students who figure in the top 20 percentile of performers in their respective school boards are eligible for the scholarship.
“The change in rules will ensure that students’ eligibility is based on how well they do in their board rather than having to compete with students from boards that may be more lenient,” a source said.
India has over 30 school boards including the centrally-run Central Board of Secondary Education and the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations. Each board conducts its own Class XII qualifying examination.
State boards of Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Punjab and Chandigarh and the CBSE and CISCE are generally rated as “high-scoring”. Students of these boards on an average score higher than counterparts in other boards. Students in schools affiliated to the state boards of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh usually score lower on an average, sources said.
“It is silly to believe that children in some states are inherently poorer performers than in other states,” an official said. Comparing students’ performance only with their peers — from a particular school board — also helps reduce any regional imbalance that may be leading to variations in scores, the official argued.
“The larger question we have tried to confront through this change in rules is whether it is at all possible to compare performances of students in Orissa villages with their counterparts in Rajasthan,” he said.