parl panel plans privilege motion against chief secys who skipped meet

The Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Thursday unanimously decided to move a privilege motion against the chief secretaries of seven states for failing to attend an important meeting on delays in disbursing pre-matric and post-matric scholarships to Scheduled Caste (SC) students, committee chairman KC Venugopal said, calling the delays “shocking” and the lack of coordination between the Centre and states a “serious issue”.

Addressing reporters after the committee’s meeting in Parliament, the Congress MP said the committee had taken a serious note of the absence of the officials, who had been summoned to explain discrepancies and delays flagged in a Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report. He alleged that the chief secretaries had neither appeared before the committee nor properly informed it of their inability to attend.

“The committee unanimously decided to give a privilege motion to the Speaker against the chief secretaries of the seven states for not attending this important Public Accounts Committee meeting without giving proper notice,” Venugopal said, adding that the committee would present its report to Parliament.

The seven states are Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha and Maharashtra. He clarified that Karnataka had not recorded delays of the same magnitude but had other discrepancies.

The meeting examined a CAG report tabled in Parliament on March 30, 2026, which had flagged implementation gaps and irregularities in the Centre’s pre-matric and post-matric scholarship schemes for SC students. The CAG report also flagged financial irregularities in scholarship disbursals, including ₹19.98 crore paid above maximum admissible rates to 1,29,754 beneficiaries under the post-matric scheme across eight states.

Venugopal said the audit had found delays of more than four years in pre-matric scholarships and around seven years in post-matric scholarships over the period under review.

“It is very, very shocking that this delay happened from 2017 to 2022. State governments and the Central government are blaming each other. There is no coordination between them. The final result is that students are not getting scholarships in due course of time,” he said.

The committee’s scrutiny comes amid wider concerns over the reach and implementation of government scholarship schemes. HT in July 2025 reported that beneficiary numbers under several central scholarship schemes for marginalised communities had declined even as allocations remained steady or increased. Under the post-matric scholarship scheme for SC students, beneficiaries fell from 54.27 lakh in 2019-20 to 47.39 lakh in 2023-24, even as central assistance rose from around ₹2,710 crore to ₹5,475 crore.

The Union ministry of education, meanwhile, on Wednesday organised a regional orientation-cum-review workshop in Bhopal to review the implementation of the National Means-cum-Merit Scholarship Scheme (NMMSS), with a focus on application verification through the National Scholarship Portal (NSP). The workshop covered student registration, onboarding, verification procedures and technical challenges faced by state officials, with officials from Madhya Pradesh and student beneficiaries participating.

The ministry emphasised the role of state, district and institute nodal officers in ensuring accurate and timely verification of scholarship applications for the 2026-27 academic year. The deadline for student registration is October 31, while institute nodal officers must complete verification by November 15 and district nodal officers by November 30. The scheme provides ₹12,000 annually to meritorious students from economically weaker sections to help prevent dropouts after Class 8 and encourage them to continue their education up to Class 12.