How technology plays a crucial role in providing the right scholarship to the right students

Over the last decade, the reach of smartphone devices and penetration of the internet has overhauled the way Indians - especially the young generation - discover information and communicate with each other in their daily lives. Currently, India is estimated to have more than 620 million internet users and 600 million smartphone users.

This massive number of internet and smartphone users has also led to a boom in technology-based start-ups that are coming up with technology-led solutions to almost every problem we encounter during the daily chores. Right from leading consumer-focused platforms like Flipkart, Amazon, Ola, Uber, Zomato to niche platforms like Lenskart and Practo, all highlight how these innovations can make life easier like never before.

Technology changing the education landscape

With more than 300 million students pursuing different levels of education in India, high drop-out rates still remain an alarming problem. More than 75% of the student population fails to reach higher education levels, mainly due to financial challenges, lack of counselling and unavailability of infrastructure, among others. One of the effective solutions to financial challenges is scholarship, which is given by both the government as well as private institutions.

In India, scholarships of more than Rs 20,000 crore are annually available but due to lack of technological interventions to match the right students with right scholarships, a significant share of this scholarship fund remains unutilized. Moreover, many corporates who wish to conduct scholarship programmes, face execution challenges and find it difficult to identify deserving candidates.

To address these challenges, many leading and emerging players are coming up with innovative technology platforms that leverage advanced technologies such as machine learning and profile matching. To begin with, these platforms host information on thousands of scholarships, thus enabling students to manually filter them as per their requirements. Once a student creates his/her profile, the platform runs an algorithm to identify matching scholarships based on student data such as education profile, vulnerability profile, financial need and similar scores.

These scholarships are then communicated to students on a regular basis through SMS, email, WhatsApp and other social media channels. Technology not only solves matching problems for students but also simplifies verification and ranking issues for scholarship providers, who can now run large scale scholarship programs with least human involvement.

How is technology playing a crucial role in the scholarship domain?

While the government has set-up a centralised technology platform for government scholarships offered by different central ministries and state governments, these innovative platforms are helping corporates to host, manage and streamline scholarship programmes in a better and hassle-free manner. Following are some key benefits of technology in scholarship domain -

Ease of finding information: The platforms primarily list all scholarship information, thus making it easily accessible to users irrespective of their location. The benefit: students get all the information at one place and get to find relevant and matching scholarships by entering their chosen filters like education level, gender, category etc.

Automated alerts: Once a student registers on this platform, they start receiving automated alerts whenever a new scholarship matching their academic level is announced. The machine learning integrated in the technology platform automatically matches the students with relevant scholarships. The benefit: human intervention is nil while the capability to serve a number of students is unlimited.

Mobile-friendly online application process: For the scholarship applications available on these platforms, users can download mobile-friendly online applications to easily fill the form on their own. The document submission process is also online and automated communication flow is set for the next stages of selection process. The benefit: technology intervention makes the entire scholarship application process smooth and hassle-free for students.

Direct fund transfer: Finally, the fund disbursement is processed online with the amount being directly transferred to the bank account of scholars. The benefit: It minimises the time lag and significantly reduces human efforts that could be required for offline process flows.

The emergence of these advanced platforms and their effective solutions can serve millions of students who face financial challenges in pursuing their educational dreams. Further, the technology-driven student tracking mechanisms used in such platforms ensure that the scholarship funds are properly utilised and only the deserving students get the next instalment of scholarships.

By Manjeet Singh, Co-founder and CEO, Buddy4Study