UP begins e-scholarship for timely payment
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Money will be directly transferred to students' account

Piyush Srivastava

Lucknow, September 2: In a first, the Uttar Pradesh government has
implemented an e-scholarship programme to ensure timely payment of
scholarships to over two crore students. Under this, the scholarships
will be directly transferred to the bank accounts of the students
electronically.

The recipients, belonging to Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe
(ST), Other Backward Caste (OBC), minority communities and Below
Poverty Line (BPL) families, had complained of not receiving their
scholarships and sometimes even receiving lapsed cheques.

VN Garg, Principal Secretary, Information Technology, said the idea
was to improve transparency in the process and effectively deal with
the largescale complaints.

"It is a major step towards e-governance," Garg said. The government
has also agreed in principle to start interactive websites on which
the students can get answers to their queries. "They can even send in
their application, complaints, check the status of those complaints
and assess any related details," he said.

About 2 crore students belonging to different categories are entitled
to this scholarship.

A monthly educational scholarship of Rs 25 to Rs 740 is given to
students enrolled in Class I up to the post-graduate level.

Garg said Uttar Pradesh is the second state after Assam, where e-
governance at district-level has been started. The districts include
Rae Bareli, Sultanpur, Gorakhpur, Sitapur, Noida and Gaziabad.

Earlier, Chief Secretary PK Mishra launched 33 new websites of state
government departments and called upon the officers to make available
all information on these websites. He told the officers to ensure
that public grievances were sorted out through e-governance.

"The utility of information technology through websites of different
departments is to strengthen the work culture and quality of the
government," he said.

The Uttar Pradesh State Wide Area Network (UPSWAN) will connect 900
nodes covering all blocks, tehsils and districts within a year. The e-
governance facility will be available in 17,909 Common Service
Centres to be established in the villages in the next three years and
50,000 unemployment youths will get employment opportunities through
it, Mishra said.