Act for Scholarship: Helping Students Secure Scholarships – ActionAid India
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Act for Scholarship: Helping Students Secure Scholarships

Published on: Monday, 30th November 2020

Author: Priyanka Khullar

Education is one of the most essential tools for inclusive and sustainable development. To enable children from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, minorities and other marginalized communities to complete their education, the Union and State Governments have put in place several scholarship schemes. However, there is also a lack of awareness among students on the available schemes.

We ran the ‘Act for Scholarship’ campaign across several states to inform students on various scholarship schemes. We associated with community-based organizations, frontline workers and volunteers. We held meetings with students, parents and officials of the relevant government departments; displayed informative posters; and distributed pamphlets to spread awareness on the various scholarship programmes. These trained volunteers also encouraged students to fill up scholarship applications and actively helped them in the process. Given the limitations in terms of reaching out to large numbers of students through physical meetings amid the ongoing pandemic, we also organized interactive webinars with students and parents on scholarship schemes.

As part of this campaign, we were able to reach out to more than 16,100 students from 28 districts of Uttar Pradesh; 15,000 students from eight districts of Haryana; nearly 11,350 students from four districts of Rajasthan; 5,000 students from six districts of Punjab; 2,500 students from five districts of Delhi-National Capital Region; and 2,500 students from four districts of Himachal Pradesh. A total of 14,491 students across these states were supported by our volunteers in filling up their scholarship applications.