BHUBANESWAR: The state government has decided to launch a common scholarship portal for the benefit of meritorious students who often fail to apply due to ignorance.
The ‘Odisha State Scholarship Portal’ will be developed as a single digital platform for all scholarship schemes and maintained by Odisha Computer Application Centre (OCAC).
An official of the Higher Education Department said OCAC will provide modules in the common portal for data analytics and blockchain for helping departments taking data based on policy decisions.
“The common portal will go live from April 2020. OCAC has been asked to complete development, testing and trial run of the portal before that. Aadhaar authenticated e-KYC process will be explored for authentic disbursal of scholarship,” he informed.
As per the decision taken at a recent high level meeting, pre-metric Unified District Information System of Education (UDISE) database of Odisha Primary Education Programme Authority (OPEPA) and Odisha School Education Programme Authority (OSEPA) and post-metric database of Student Academic Management System (SAMS) will be used for developing a comprehensive ‘Student Registry’ by the OCAC.
The departments will then take necessary steps to provide application programme interface for real-time sharing of data with the scholarship portal and OCAC will define the data sharing protocol.
The portal will be integrated in the iFMS to have an end-to-end scholarship disbursement process without any human intervention.
The student registry can also be used for delivery of many other benefits like financial incentives to school students for purchase of bi-cycles by School and Mass Education Department.