Speed Post News Network
New Delhi : Ministry of Tribal Affairs (MoTA) has received SKOCH Gold Award for its “Empowerment of Tribals through IT enabled Scholarship Schemes” project of Scholarship Divison of the Ministry. The 66th SKOCH 2020 Competition was entitled “INDIA RESPONDS TO COVID THROUGH DIGITAL GOVERNANCE” and MoTA chose to participate in DIGITAL INDIA & E-GOVERNANCE – 2020 Competition and the awards were announced on July 30, 2020.
This project is a step towards achieving unwavering commitment of Government of India towards realising the dreams of Digital India and bringing transparency as well as ease in the delivery of services. To assimilate with the larger vision of ‘Digital India’ and to realise the cherished goal of e-governance, MoTA has integrated all 5 Scholarship Schemes with DBT Portal under the guidance of DBT Mission. The initiative was rolled out on June 12, 2019, by the Union Tribal Affairs Minister Arjun Munda and MoS Renuka Singh Sarota.
During 2019-20, under 5 Scholarship schemes, about Rs 2,500 crore were directly transferred to student’s Bank accounts through DBT to approximately 30 lakh students in 31 States and UTs. The portal provides facility to States for data sharing through Web services and States can up-load proposal, UCs and SOE online. This has brought paradigm shift from Paper based UC monitoring mandated for budget release to data enabled budget release and monitoring process. This has considerably reduced scholarship release time and now it is possible to release scholarship in the same academic year in which admission is taken, according to a PIB release.
MoTA has also entered into CEDA (Centre for Data Analytics), which analyses and prepares State Wise Data Analysis Reports, which helps in data based planning. In Fellowship Scheme run by Ministry for doing PhD, all 331 Universities have been integrated with the portal thereby enabling verification application online.