CBSE, Bihar students gain as UP loses out in INSPIRE scholarship allocation overhaul

A change in how the Union government allocates scholarships under its flagship INSPIRE-Scholarship for Higher Education (SHE) scheme has sharply reduced the number of awards available to school boards of several states, including Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, while boosting quotas for students from other state and central education boards, according to official data for 2024 and 2025.

In 2025, the Department of Science and Technology (DST) introduced quotas by school education board based on the number of Class 12 examinees rather than the number of applications received from students of each board.

This change led to a nearly 66% drop in the number of Uttar Pradesh Madhyamik Shiksha Parishad (UPMSP) students cleared for the science scholarship.

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In 2024, the UP board students made up 49% of the 21,392 valid applications received nationwide for the Scholarship for Higher Education (SHE) component of the Innovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired Research (INSPIRE) scheme, and 6,129 students were provisionally selected out of a total of 12,000 scholarships.

In 2025, the state board students received only 2,095 of the 12,000 scholarships, despite 2.54 million Class 12 examinees.

The comparison is based on DST’s ‘Computation Chart of INSPIRE Scholarship (SHE) for the Year-2024’, which contains the selection details and was announced on December 31, 2025, and the advertisement inviting applications issued on November 7, 2026.

What is INSPIRE-SHE and who is eligible?

Every year, around 12,000 INSPIRE-SHE scholarships are awarded to students pursuing undergraduate and postgraduate courses in basic and natural sciences. Eligible candidates include students in the top 1% of their respective Class 12 board examinations and those qualifying through specified national-level entrance examinations.

How the allocation formula changed

DST allocated the 12,000 national scholarships based on each state board’s share of total valid applications received nationwide from students pursuing basic and natural sciences. Because UP had high demand, it received nearly half the total awards.

The new model replaced application demand with a strict mathematical quota based on each recognised board’s share of total Class 12 examinees across India.

This has reduced the absolute numbers for students from the Uttar Pradesh board, followed by the Rajasthan school education board, which suffered a 70% decline to 725 scholarships in 2025, Madhya Pradesh, which declined to 532 from 762 in 2024, while Uttarakhand’s allocation has fallen from 297 selections to 88 and Chhattisgarh’s from 300 to 196.

Students in many school boards have gained. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) allocation rose from 86 students to 1,397 in 2024, while Maharashtra’s rose from 52 to 1,234 and Bihar’s from 260 to 1,056. Tamil Nadu, which had 5 selections in 2024, has been allotted 654 scholarships, while Karnataka’s allocation has risen from 8 to 541. These are among the largest increases in absolute numbers.

The new formula, however, does not directly account for how many students from each board enrol in eligible undergraduate courses in basic and natural sciences. Nor do the revised guidelines specify whether unfilled board-wise allocations will be redistributed to other boards.

Pranit Sohane, a BSc student at Swargiya Sundar Lal Shivhare Degree College in Hamirpur, affiliated with Bundelkhand University, Jhansi, said the revised formula could disadvantage students in states with a large pool of applicants. Sohane scored 87% in the 2025 Uttar Pradesh Board Class 12 examinations, above the state’s 81% cut-off for students in the top 1%.

Sohane said that because relatively few students from boards such as CBSE and Bihar enrol in eligible science courses, even a few hundred applications from these boards could exhaust their allocated quotas. “If eligible seats in these categories remain unfilled, the new guidelines do not clarify whether they will be redistributed. This could leave some scholarships vacant and bring down the total number of awards to around 10,000, rather than the 12,000 envisaged under the scheme. In contrast, students from Uttar Pradesh, where the number of applicants is likely to be much higher, will have to compete for a limited pool of about 2,000 scholarships,” he added.

Anindita Bhadra, professor at IISER Kolkata, also questioned the revised allocation model.

“It is rather stupid to change the board-wise allocation. 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,” she said.