The Karnataka state government will soon disburse free scholarship e-cards for post-matric Scheduled Caste (SC) students, using their Aadhaar, caste and family income IDs, and registration number of the last Board examination.

"Karnataka is the first state in the country to implement the Central government guidelines on the post-matric scholarship for SC students in letter and spirit," said Additional Chief Secretary, Department of Personnel & Administrative Reforms (DPAR) (e-governance) Rajiv Chawla on Thursday.

He added that the state will be the first to introduce a paperless system to award the scholarship to deserving post-matric students. "The entire process of entering details, verification, admission, disbursement of scholarship and tracking of students has been automated," said the senior IAS officer.

The post-matric scholarships are centrally-sponsored schemes implemented through state governments. Explaining the modalities of the soon-to-be-launched scheme, Chawla said the students need to log into the State Scholarship Portal (SSP) and upload the three certificates.

"These details will be verified electronically and students can download and show it to the college for admission, as a guarantee of payment of fee by the government. We are connected with the state, CBSE and ICSE boards, and 65 universities,” Chawla said.

"We are discussing whether UPI prepaid e-vouchers can be redeemed by the college where the student has taken admission with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPIC). If that doesn't work, then disbursement of fee will be done to the Aadhaar-seeded bank accounts of the students," he added.

The system has embedded exclusions and restrictions to weed out ineligible candidates. For instance, a scholarship application for the same group course or for a second professional course. Besides, 75 per cent biometric attendance is a must for continuation of scholarship.