Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Poverty Alleviation and Social Protection, Dr. Sania Nishtar, has asked the Higher Education Commission (HEC) to blacklist those universities that have not distributed Ehsaas scholarship funds with complete transparency.
While presiding over a meeting of Ehsaas Undergraduate Scholarship Program’s steering committee on Wednesday, Dr. Nishtar said that the payments need to be made in time so that students do not have to seek loans to support their studies.
“This is not a reimbursement model. Students have to be paid on time, to facilitate them to continue their studies,” she said.
The SAPM asked the HEC to take action against those universities that failed to make the payments in time or deducted money from stipends on account of other expenses.
“Universities having failed to pay students on time or having spent Ehsaas scholarship money on other expenses should be singled out and blacklisted,” she instructed the HEC officials present in the meeting.
She also suggested preparing a ‘visibility dashboard’ to have the data of each participating university of when they received the amount and dates on which students have been given stipends.
New Applications
The meeting also decided to reopen the Ehsaas application portal on 30 September, for a period of two months, to accept new applications for the ongoing academic year.
All students studying in any of the 129 public universities across the country and have a family monthly income of less than Rs. 45,000 are eligible to apply for the Ehsaas stipend.
Selected students will receive a stipend of Rs. 4,000 a month to help them bear their educational expenses.
The program aims to help 200,000 deserving students over the course of their graduation. Over the last two years, the program has enrolled 142,000 students, and further 50,000 students will be included in the list over the next two months.
Students can apply for the scholarship through the program’s online portal.
The fact is that few universities pay half the stipends to the selected candidates despite no issues in records and results.