AICTE Saksham Scholarship: Eligibility, Disability Certificate and Income Limit

What the certificate has to say

The threshold is 40% disability or more, certified by a competent medical authority. The number matters: a certificate that records a condition without quantifying it, or that records a percentage below 40, does not meet the condition however genuine the difficulty it describes.

Certificates are issued by designated medical boards at government hospitals, and the Unique Disability ID (UDID) system now issues a card carrying the same information in a portable form. Where a UDID is available it is worth obtaining: it is recognised nationally, it does not have to be re-established every time a new authority asks, and the online scholarship workflow handles it more cleanly than a scanned paper certificate.

If your certificate is old, check whether it carries a validity date and whether the percentage was recorded under the current assessment guidelines. Reassessment takes time and is better done before an application season than during a query.

Category-blind, and that is unusual

Almost every central scholarship on the National Scholarship Portal is defined by a social category. This one is not. A General-category student with a 40% disability certificate and family income under ₹8 lakh is as eligible as anyone else, and there is no separate quota being competed for within it.

That is worth saying because students frequently assume the portal has nothing for them if they are not SC, ST or OBC, and stop looking. Between Saksham and the Central Sector Scholarship there are two substantial central schemes with no category condition at all.

It also does not displace anything else you are entitled to. Reservation in admission, age relaxation in recruitment and fee concessions under other rules are separate entitlements with their own tests; holding Saksham neither creates nor removes them.

The AICTE approval condition applies here too

As with Pragati, the institution must be AICTE-approved and the course must be technical. The check is the same: find the institution on the AICTE list, then confirm your specific programme appears against it.

This is a harder constraint for disabled students than it looks, because accessibility varies enormously between institutions and the accessible option near you is not always the approved one. If you are still choosing, it is worth asking each shortlisted institution two questions in the same conversation: what its AICTE approval covers, and what physical and academic accommodations it actually provides. The answers together decide more about the next four years than the ranking does.

What the money is for

The award is towards fees, books, equipment and course-related costs rather than a reimbursement of one named fee head, which matters more here than in other schemes. Assistive technology — screen-reading software, a braille display, a recorder, adapted equipment for laboratory work — is a real cost of a technical course for a disabled student and is not covered by a tuition waiver.

Flexibility is the practical value of this scheme. A student whose tuition is already covered by a state fee concession still has the equipment problem, and ₹50,000 that can be spent on solving it is worth more than a larger sum that can only be spent on tuition already paid.

There is a parallel route for women: Pragati supports girl students in the same courses, and its entry rule is different — first-year admission only, and up to two daughters in one family. Where both are open to you, the deciding question is usually which one you can evidence more cleanly, not which pays more.

सक्षम छात्रवृत्ति उन छात्रों के लिए है जिनकी दिव्यांगता 40% या उससे ज़्यादा है और जो AICTE से मान्यता प्राप्त तकनीकी डिप्लोमा या डिग्री कोर्स में पढ़ रहे हैं। हर साल ₹50,000 मिलते हैं। आय सीमा ₹8 लाख है।

इसमें कोई जाति शर्त नहीं है — सामान्य वर्ग का छात्र भी उतना ही पात्र है। पोर्टल पर यह उन गिनी-चुनी योजनाओं में है जिनमें श्रेणी नहीं पूछी जाती।

प्रमाणपत्र में प्रतिशत लिखा होना ज़रूरी है। सिर्फ़ बीमारी या स्थिति लिखी हो और प्रतिशत न हो, तो आवेदन नहीं बनता। हो सके तो UDID कार्ड बनवा लीजिए — पूरे देश में मान्य है और ऑनलाइन आवेदन में आसानी रहती है।

यह पैसा फीस के अलावा किताबों, उपकरण और सहायक तकनीक — स्क्रीन रीडर, ब्रेल डिस्प्ले, रिकॉर्डर — पर भी ख़र्च किया जा सकता है, जो तकनीकी पढ़ाई में असली ख़र्च है।