Pre, Post-Matric Scholarships for minorities disbursed to thousands of ineligible or fake beneficiaries: CAG

An audit of the pre-matric and post-matric scholarships for minority students has revealed that at least Rs 9 crore have been disbursed to over 11,000 beneficiaries who could not be traced at the schools mentioned or whose schools were “non-operational”. That apart, scholarships have also been disbursed despite candidates not meeting income criteria or failing to maintain minimum marks, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India has found.

The CAG audit - whose report was published this week of December 2025 - looked into the PMS scholarship disbursals over the years 2020-21 to 2022-23. Apart from examining data, the audit committee chose a sample of 174 districts in 27 states and seven union territories, factoring in minority population, for a field audit which covered the period from 2017-18 to 2020-21. The team used data of 34,418 applications in 1,589 institutes for pre-matric scholarship, and 30,723 applications in 1,635 institutes for the post-matric scholarship for minority scheme.

The pre-matric and post-matric scholarships were launched with the objective of ensuring students from historically-marginalised communities – the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and minorities – stayed enrolled in schools. The pre-matric one supported children from Classes 6 to 10 and the post-matric one, from Class 11 onwards. In 2022, the union government discontinued pre-matric scholarship support up to Class 8, arguing that those children were already covered by the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan scheme and the Right to Education Act. The scholarships for minorities are managed by the ministry of minority affairs.

PMS Scholarship: ‘Time lag in payment’

Apart from flagging irregularities in the disbursement of scholarships, the CAG also noted that a “substantial” amount of scholarships for a particular financial year “spilled over” to next financial year.

The report says, “This indicates a time lag in payment of scholarship despite it being on reimbursement basis. The ministry did not have a mechanism to monitor and quantify the delay in distribution of scholarships to a particular beneficiary. This affected the objective of providing timely financial support to the beneficiary on the economic fringes of the community.”

Although the CAG report does not mention it, the audit years coincide with the covid pandemic ones that saw widespread disruption in education and all processes; the education ministry’s own budget utilisation had dropped. The CAG report, however, doesn’t factor in the pandemic.

Excess, multiple scholarships

The audit team remarks that systemic “deficiencies” have led to scholarships going to ‘beneficiaries’ who did not qualify – they were over the income threshold, did not maintain school performance or were not enrolled at all. In some cases, beneficiaries received excess scholarships.

The field audit revealed that across eight states 472 students on pre-matric scholarships claimed multiple scholarships, amounting to Rs 18.04 lakh. Plus, 2,854 students in four states and union territories were paid “excess scholarship” totalling to Rs 90.74 lakh.

Among post-matric scholarship holders, 4,794 students across 12 states had received multiple, amounting to Rs 311.61 lakh and 7,883 students were given “excess scholarship”, costing the state Rs 302.15 lakh.

“These weaknesses in controls resulted in keeping the support intended to be provided under the schemes out of the reach for some eligible students,” the CAG report states.

Pre, Post Matric Scholarships: Beneficiaries ‘not found’

The committee also found 8,669 applicants for pre and post scholarship beneficiaries whose names could not be found in the records of the schools or institutions they claimed to be enrolled in. Scholarships disbursed to this group totalled Rs 681.71 lakh.

Similarly 2,717 students were found to have been verified and approved for scholarships whose institutes or schools were "non-operational"; this group got Rs 246.65 lakh.

The audit committee also found that scholarships were renewed for students who did not obtain minimum marks in their previous classes. “In 13 states/UTs, 1,902 students who secured less than 50% in the previous class, were granted pre-matric scholarships amounting to Rs 37.40 lakh in contravention of the scheme guidelines.” Similarly, in post-matric scholarships, 1,725 students were granted scholarships of Rs 104.10 lakh despite failing to meet academic requirements. Plus, in several cases, more than two students from a family were granted scholarships.

National Scholarship Portal and monitoring

The report says the ministry needs to review the schemes’ implementation and “strengthen mechanisms” to ensure right applicants avail their benefits.

It says that “sole reliance” on the NSP scholarship portal for monitoring has led to irregularities in disbursal. “This was indicative of a weak control mechanism for the schemes at the level of beneficiary verification,” the report added.

The ministry responded: “NSP is an evolving platform, and some steps were taken in 2019-20 to make the implementation of scholarship schemes more robust and transparent. These included checks such as Aadhaar exception handling, fresh registration of institutes with valid AISHE/UDISE/NCVET/SCVT codes with NSP, verification of KYC of institutes etc.”

However, CAG found these checks “inadequate” and pointed to irregularities found independently by the third-party evaluator, National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER).