Students who fail or miss a university examination will no longer be able to retain their scholarships under the Centre’s flagship INSPIRE-Scholarship for Higher Education (SHE) scheme, and the annual research mentorship grant has been restricted to the third and fourth years, reducing the maximum financial support over five years.
The Department of Science and Technology (DST) has also changed the way scholarships are allocated among school boards, introducing quotas by board, based on the number of Class 12 examinees rather than the number of applications received.
DST announced the changes on November 7, opening applications for the 2025 batch of INSPIRE-SHE, following a delay of more than a year. Experts and students said the revised rules could make it harder for students to retain the scholarship, reduce financial support for research projects and alter the distribution of awards across states, potentially leaving some board quotas unfilled.
The online application window will remain open until December 7, 11.59pm. Only candidates aged 17-22 who cleared their Class 12 examinations in 2025 will be considered.
ALSO READ | ₹1,000 crore">Six foreign universities commit to scholarships worth ₹1,000 crore
What is INSPIRE-SHE and who is eligible?
{{/usCountry}}ALSO READ | ₹1,000 crore">Six foreign universities commit to scholarships worth ₹1,000 crore
What is INSPIRE-SHE and who is eligible?
{{/usCountry}}Every year, around 12,000 INSPIRE-SHE scholarships are awarded to students pursuing undergraduate and postgraduate courses in basic and natural sciences. The scheme provides ₹5,000 a month, or ₹60,000 annually, along with a ₹20,000 annual mentorship grant. Eligible candidates include students in the top 1% of their respective Class 12 board examinations and those qualifying through specified national-level entrance examinations.
The application cycle usually begins around September, after college admissions and competitive examination results, and ends by October-November. However, no application notification was issued in 2025, leaving science aspirants uncertain about the scheme’s future, HT reported on July 15.
In a post on X on the same day, DST, which did not respond to queries from HT at the time, said: “INSPIRE-SHE scheme is not scrapped. It is being redesigned currently. Hence, there has been a delay in announcing the call.”
DST did not respond to HT’s request for comment on the latest changes.
Mentorship grant restricted to third and fourth years
Under the revised financial structure, the monthly scholarship remains ₹5,000, or ₹60,000 annually. However, the ₹20,000 mentorship grant will now be available only in the third and fourth years, instead of every year. This reduces the maximum support over the five-year scholarship period from ₹4 lakh to ₹3.4 lakh.
Students failing or missing exams to lose scholarship
The academic rules have also been tightened. Under the 2024 guidelines, students who failed an examination or could not appear for it “forfeited” the scholarship for that academic year but could resume receiving support the following year if they met the prescribed requirements.
The 2025 guidelines remove this provision. “If a scholar has failed or secured less than 60% or 7 CGPA (cumulative grade point average) in the first year, he/she will not be eligible to receive even the first-year scholarship, and will be ineligible for the entire SHE scholarship period,” the revised frequently asked questions (FAQs) document says. Failure in subsequent years will mean the “scholarship shall be discontinued with immediate effect”, making the student ineligible for subsequent scholarship and mentorship instalments.
“These are substantial revisions, and not for the better,” said Anindita Bhadra, professor at IISER Kolkata. “The reduction in the fellowship amount is a big setback, as with fees in colleges constantly on the rise, fewer students would be able to support their education with this fellowship. The allocated funds per student should actually increase, not decrease in the revised guidelines.”
Akhil Tripathi, co-founder of Noida-based science education platform SciAstra, said the mentorship grant was particularly important in the initial years. “In the first two years, the ₹20,000 grant is what lets a student take up a proper research project, and that early exposure often decides who stays in science,” he said.
“Since 2008, the PhD fellowship has gone up about three times, but INSPIRE-SHE has stayed at ₹80,000 a year since the start, and now it is being cut. That goes against what INSPIRE was meant to do,” he added.
Tripathi also questioned the stricter academic rules. “In subjects like Maths, a lot of students get a backlog in the first year, and this happens even at institutions like IISc, IISER and NISER. Till now, if someone failed, they lost that year’s scholarship but could get it back the next year. Now one fails in the first year and the student is out of the scholarship completely, and in later years even a missed exam ends it,” he said.
Scholarship allocation formula changed
The top-1% eligibility criterion remains unchanged, but the allocation formula has been revised. Under the 2024 guidelines, each board’s share of the total valid scholarship applications determined its allocation. The 2025 guidelines instead link the quota to the proportion of students who appeared for Class 12 examinations from each board. The revised FAQ does not specify whether unfilled board allocations will be redistributed.
“The earlier rule made sense, and was less biased. A state with a higher population is now likely to see more candidates with the fellowship, while more eligible students from other states will lose out,” Bhadra said.
Pranit Sohane, a BSc student at Swargiya Sundar Lal Shivhare Degree College in Hamirpur, affiliated with Bundelkhand University, Jhansi, said the revised formula could leave some board quotas under-utilised while increasing competition in states with larger applicant pools. Sohane scored 87% in the 2025 Uttar Pradesh Board Class 12 examinations, above the state’s 81% top-1% cut-off.
“Earlier, scholarships were allocated based on applications received from different boards. Under the new formula, quotas are linked to the number of students appearing for Class 12, reducing Uttar Pradesh’s share from 6,129 scholarships last year to just 2,095. Boards such as CBSE and Bihar, with fewer applicants for science courses, may fill their quotas with just a few hundred students, leaving seats vacant. If these are not redistributed, the total number of scholarships could fall to around 10,000, while students from Uttar Pradesh will face greater competition for the limited seats,” he said.
Course-wise preference order introduced
The revised guidelines also introduce an explicit course-wise preference order. Students in the top 1% of their boards enrolled in integrated MSc and BS-MS programmes will be considered first. They will be followed by candidates with specified JEE or NEET ranks, NTSE or JBNSTS qualifications, or International Olympiad medals, and then top-1% students enrolled in regular BSc and BS programmes.
The framework also expands the list of eligible undergraduate science subjects from 18 in 2024 to 28 in 2025. Biotechnology, bioinformatics, biostatistics, environmental science, data science, materials science, nanoscience, life sciences and earth sciences are among the subjects included. The postgraduate list has expanded from 30 to 35.
Another change concerns eligibility for the INSPIRE Fellowship for doctoral studies. The revised provisions recognise four-year BSc (Hons.) and BSc with Research degrees of at least eight semesters, alongside MSc/MS qualifications, subject to prescribed academic criteria. This opens a route for eligible graduates to apply for doctoral fellowships without first completing a master’s degree, in line with the four-year undergraduate structure under the National Education Policy (NEP 2020).