Staff Reporter
Ehsaas Undergraduate Scholarship application portal will be reopened from September 30 for the period of two months to allow maximum deserving students to apply for the scholarship and continue higher studies.
According to an official source, the Ehsaas online portal will remain open for next two months to receive new applications for the academic year 2021-22.
All students with family income of less than Rs. 45,000 a month studying in the undergraduate programme across any of the 129 public sector universities recognised by Higher Education Commission (HEC) will be eligible to apply for scholarship.
During the last two academic years, over 142,000 need-cum-merit based Ehsaas undergraduate scholarships have been awarded while this also, 50,000 scholarships will be awarded to deserving students.
The students will be able to apply through the online portal: https://ehsaas.hec.gov.pk/. The need cum merit-based undergraduate scholarship of Ehsaas covers hundred percent tuition fee of the university and a living stipend.
Ehsaas undergraduate Scholarship programme will support 200,000 students from low-income backgrounds over four years. The total budget is Rs. 24 billion.
The programme covers all the four provinces, Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Gilgit Baltistan and Islamabad Capital Territory. As part of the undergraduate scholarship policy of Ehsaas, fifty percent of awardees are girls.
For already enrolled awardees, their academic performance will be tracked, and subject to satisfactory academic progress, they will continue to receive the Ehsaas scholarship till the completion of their undergraduate degree.
It is also pertinent to mention here that the steering committee of the programme in a meeting held recently emphasized on the need for timely payments to students so that they do not have to take loans.
The committee also instructed HEC to strictly reprimand universities who do not pay students on time and those who deduct money from the Ehsaas scholarship stipend amount on account of other expenses.
It was also instructed that the full visibility should be made of those universities which have done this and that they should be blacklisted.
The staff was instructed to make a visibility dashboard and stressed on the need for each participating university to be transparent about when they receive money from Ehsaas, vis-à-vis, the cheque numbers and dates on which students have been given stipends.
The committee observed that this is very much in line with the transparency policy of Ehsaas where all benefits going to beneficiaries are publicly posted online, as for Ehsaas Kafaalat.
