KCR’s Surprise About FAST Is Out! Scholarship Directly To Students With 75% Attendance

Last week, when CM KCR met with Journos and was asked about FAST and the 1956 cut-off, he quipped there is another ‘angle’ to the FAST scheme which will come out soon. Now it is out!

FAST (Financial Assistance to Students of Telangana – FAST) Scholarship is turning the fee reimbursement scheme upside down and may cause major heartburn for managements of engineering colleges. The erstwhile fee reimbursement scheme was criticized to be an employment scheme for college managements rather than a scheme to help needy students. The latest FAST scholarship s set to rectify those mistakes and remove irregularities from the newly introduced scholarship scheme to help the really needy and also bring up the quality of education with the Government fee reimbursement funds.

Here are some major points in the FAST scheme:

• State Government would cut down the link between the Government and the colleges and deposits the scholarship money directly into the students’ accounts. The colleges in future would have to directly deal with students on fee payment.
• To cut down bogus students and false claims, which is widespread, biometric machines would have to be installed for registering students’ attendance in all colleges and connect them to a central system in the university, under which the college falls.
• 75 per cent attendance mandatory if students wish to get financial assistance.
• 50 or 60 % marks mandatory to gain eligibility.
• Only the top 10 per cent or 20 per cent candidates in the entrance exam may be given full reimbursement. There would be different ceilings and students may get different % of fee reimbursement, based on their attendance and percentages. So FAST would be a scholarship and not fee reimbursement.