Portal of on-line scholarship in Maharashtra not working since 5 months
By Vikas Vaidya
The issue of scholarship is haunting Maharashtra. To add to woes of beneficiaries the portal through which the procedure of scholarship conducted is not functioning since April 30. The website was being handled by MASTEK company whose contract came to an end on April 30 and since then the website is not functioning.
With over Rs 100 crore pending with Government against the scholarship to be paid to students of reserved category, the educational institutes especially engineering colleges are facing financial crunch. Most of the colleges are unable to pay the salaries of their employees.
The reliable sources told ‘The Hitavada’. The stoppage of website through which procedure of on-line scholarship gets operated, has brought everything related to scholarship to standstill.” It is learnt that MASTEK discontinued as the money was not paid to it. It was requested to TCS to run the website but that too did not work.
The website does whole work of scholarship. It is the part of Social Welfare department. The procedure like submission of applications by students, colleges is done on this website. The bills of the scholarship too are generated on this website. How much scholarship distributed is displayed on this website so that everybody can see it. The process of disbursement of scholarship to SC, ST, VJNT, OBC and others is also conducted through this website.
The Social Welfare department distribute the scholarship amount of about 1.54 lakh students of Nagpur district every year. This year it could distribute the scholarship worth Rs 90 crore of 89,000 students for the year 2016-17. The scholarship of 64,000 students amounting to Rs 70 crore is pending. Some Rs 40 crore of the year 2015-16 is yet not distributed. The reason behind the delay in scholarship is said to be the non-functioning of the on-line scholarship website. Colleges are not able to submit the applications and Social Welfare department is not able to generate bills.
The department tried to conduct the process manually but it is already facing manpower crunch. A senior office said that the verification had become tougher. If everything is to be checked in a proper manner then it would take time.
Comments
Post a Comment