The 8,400 scholarships Indian students don't know about (yet).

Building NIGOC's Scholarship Match Engine required us to do something most students and counselors don't have time for: actually counting how many scholarships exist for Indian students at any one time. Here is what the audit found, what surprised us, and why so much of the money is invisible.

The numbers

As of February 2026, our active-scholarship index sits at 8,427 entries. Broken down:

Source	Count	Median award
Central Government (MHRD, AICTE, UGC, DBT, INSPIRE, etc.)	312	₹40,000 / yr
State Governments (28 states + 8 UTs)	1,089	₹20,000 / yr
Private Trusts & Foundations	4,866	₹15,000 / yr
Educational Institutions (institution-internal merit + need-based)	1,924	Tuition partial
Corporate CSR programmes	236	₹30,000 / yr

What surprised us

Three findings, in order of consequence.

1. The private trust category is enormous and almost entirely invisible. 4,866 active programmes is more than half of the entire index. Most live on individual trust websites in formats no aggregator covers — the National Scholarship Portal indexes Central + select state programmes but the long tail of family trusts (set up under §80G of the Income-tax Act for charitable purposes) does not surface anywhere. We had to build an LLM-driven discovery pipeline that crawls trust registrations from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs CSR filings, then matches them against websites and current eligibility windows.

2. State scholarships are the most overlooked high-value source. The median state-government scholarship is ₹20,000/year, but the ceiling on top programmes (Tamil Nadu's Pudhumai Penn, Karnataka's Vidyasiri, West Bengal's Kanyashree) is ₹50,000-1,00,000/year. Most non-resident-state students don't know they exist; most resident-state students don't know they're eligible beyond the first one or two everyone has heard of.

3. Institution-internal scholarships are widely underclaimed. Roughly 38% of NAAC A+ autonomous colleges have institution-internal need-based scholarship pools that go unused every year because students simply don't apply. The applications are usually a single page; the awards are usually fee waivers worth ₹50,000-1,50,000.

The eligibility geometry

The reason scholarships are hard for individual students to find is that eligibility is multi-dimensional. A typical scholarship has filters on:

• Category (SC / ST / OBC / EWS / general / minority / PwD)
• State of residence vs. state of study
• Income range
• Stream / subject
• Class / year of study
• Board (CBSE / ICSE / state board)
• Gender
• Religion-based minority status (where applicable, per Constitution Article 30)
• Specific occupation of parent (e.g. armed-forces, scheduled tribe artisan, beedi worker)

A given student matches against typically 60-200 scholarships in this multi-dimensional space. Searching manually would take days. Searching with the right LLM agent takes 14 seconds.

What we're building

The NIGOC Scholarship Match Engine is the front-end of this data work. It runs in 22 Indian languages because most state scholarship forms are issued in regional languages and a Hindi-only or English-only agent would miss them. It pre-fills the National Scholarship Portal forms because that is where 60+% of Central + state applications happen. It tracks application status post-submission because students need to know if they got the award before fee deadlines.

If you're a private trust running a scholarship and you want NIGOC's agent to index your programme — write to us. We don't charge to index, and we publish every programme we list. If your scholarship is real, NIGOC will surface it to every eligible student we serve.