Tuition Fees and Examination Fees to VJNT Students, Maharashtra

What is the Tuition Fees and Examination Fees to VJNT Students scheme?

Tuition Fees and Examination Fees to VJNT Students is a Government of Maharashtra freeship for students of the Vimukta Jati and Nomadic Tribes communities who have gone past Class 10 into post-matric education. According to the MahaDBT scheme page, all compulsory fees: tuition fees, examination fees and other admissible fees, are reimbursed to the VJNT student, so that the cost of the seat is not the reason a student drops out.

The scheme is run by the Other Backward Bahujan Welfare Department, the department older documents still name as the OBC, SEBC, VJNT and SBC Welfare Department. Payment reaches the student and the institute through the state's Direct Benefit Transfer system, and the whole application runs on the MahaDBT portal rather than on paper.

The single most important thing to understand about this scheme is the income band. Maharashtra splits its post-matric support into two products for the same VJNT student:

This is why families are often told they "already have a scholarship" and then find no maintenance allowance in the bank. The freeship is a fee benefit only. The comparable freeships for other categories sit alongside it: SBC students have "Tuition Fees and Examination Fees to SBC Students", and OBC and SEBC students have their own versions, which reimburse 50 percent of tuition and exam fees rather than the full amount. The VJNT freeship is the more generous of the two designs.

Who is eligible for the VJNT tuition and examination fee freeship?

You can claim the freeship if:

• You belong to a notified Vimukta Jati or Nomadic Tribe caste of Maharashtra: VJ-A, NT-B, NT-C or NT-D, and hold a caste certificate from the competent authority.
• You are a domicile of Maharashtra. Students of the Maharashtra-Karnataka border area covered by the state are also allowed to apply.
• Your parents' or guardian's annual family income is between Rs 1,00,001 and Rs 8,00,000.
• You are pursuing a post-matric course approved by the Government of Maharashtra; junior college, diploma, degree, professional degree or postgraduate study.
• Your institute is a government, government-aided, private unaided or permanently non-aided college recognised for the scheme.
• You have passed the previous year's examination.

You are not eligible and cannot apply if:

• Your caste is not in the VJNT list. SBC, OBC and SEBC students have their own parallel freeships, and Scheduled Caste students apply under the Social Justice and Special Assistance Department instead.
• Your family income is above Rs 8,00,000 a year.
• Your family income is Rs 1,00,000 or less — in that case you are outside this freeship and should apply for the Post-Matric Scholarship to VJNT Students, which is worth more.
• You are not a Maharashtra domicile, even if you are studying inside the state.
• You are in Class 10 or below, where the pre-matric schemes apply.
• Your course or institute is not approved by the state for the scheme.
• You are already sanctioned another fee-reimbursement scheme for the same academic year. A student cannot hold two fee benefits for one year.
• You failed the previous year's examination, in which case no reimbursement is paid for that year.

How much does the freeship actually cover?

The freeship pays 100 percent of the tuition fee and the examination fee, plus other compulsory fees that the state has declared admissible for the course. There is no flat rupee figure published, because the amount tracks the fee approved for your particular course and institute. A student in an aided arts degree may see a few thousand rupees a year; a student in a professional degree course admitted through the Centralised Admission Process may see a benefit worth tens of thousands of rupees a year.

What the freeship does not include is a living allowance. Maharashtra pays maintenance to VJNT students under separate heads, the Post-Matric Scholarship for the lowest income band, and the "Payment of Maintenance Allowance to VJNT and SBC Students Studying in Professional Courses and Living in Hostel Attached to Professional Colleges" scheme for hostellers in professional courses. If you need money in hand rather than a fee waiver, check whether you qualify under one of those instead.

What documents are required for the VJNT freeship?

How to apply for Tuition Fees and Examination Fees to VJNT Students

1. Open mahadbt2.maharashtra.gov.in and choose English or Marathi from the language toggle. Applications for scholarships and freeships are accepted only on this portal from 1 June 2026.
2. Click New Applicant Registration and register using your Aadhaar number or Aadhaar enrolment ID, then verify the one-time passwords sent to your mobile number and email. Keep that mobile number active for the rest of the year.
3. Complete your profile; personal details, domicile, caste and sub-caste, family income, past qualifications, current course and institute, and your own bank account. The portal pre-fills part of this from Aadhaar and the CET Cell records, so read and correct rather than retype.
4. Upload the documents listed above as clear scans within the file size the portal accepts. A blurred income certificate is the most common upload that gets sent back.
5. Go to All Schemes, filter by the Other Backward Bahujan Welfare Department, and select Tuition Fees and Examination Fees to VJNT Students. Check the scheme name carefully. The OBC, SEBC and SBC versions look almost identical in the list.
6. Answer the scheme questions, enter the fee you have paid, submit the form and note down the application ID shown on screen.
7. Take the printout and the original documents to your institute's scholarship section. The college must verify your application online before it moves to the district office for sanction. An application the college never verifies simply lapses.

How to apply if you cannot fill the form yourself

The scheme has no paper form, so a student without a computer has three practical routes:

1. The college scholarship section, which has to verify your application in any case and normally keeps a terminal for it.
2. A Maha e-Seva Kendra or Common Service Centre, where an operator files the application for a small notified fee.
3. The Assistant Commissioner for Social Welfare or the district office of the Other Backward Bahujan Welfare Department, which handles VJNT scheme queries.

How do I check my freeship status?

Log in to MahaDBT and open Track Application, then enter your application ID. The tracker shows the stage the file has reached: pending at institute, pending at the district or Assistant Commissioner level, sanctioned, or rejected with a recorded reason. After sanction, the fee component is released against your institute and the payment entry appears in your MahaDBT payment history.

Check the tracker at least once a fortnight during the application season. Almost every fixable problem, a rejected document, a wrong bank account, an unverified application sitting with the college: shows up there weeks before the window closes.

Why VJNT freeship applications get rejected

• Income certificate outside the band. An income certificate showing Rs 95,000 belongs to the Post-Matric Scholarship, not this freeship, and an income above Rs 8 lakh disqualifies the student entirely.
• Expired income certificate carried over from an earlier financial year.
• Caste validity certificate missing for a professional degree course.
• Institute never verified the application, so it lapsed at stage one.
• Wrong scheme selected from the list, the SBC, OBC and SEBC freeships have nearly the same name and are a frequent misclick.
• Bank account not Aadhaar-seeded, or an account in a parent's name instead of the student's own name.
• Name mismatch between the caste certificate, Aadhaar and the marksheet.
• Failure in the previous year, which stops reimbursement for that year.
• Duplicate benefit already sanctioned for the same academic year.

Key dates for the VJNT freeship

MahaDBT keeps the application window open for roughly a full academic year rather than a few weeks. For A.Y. 2025-26 the portal recorded applications being accepted from 30 June 2025 up to 30 June 2026. Maharashtra then moved post-matric and pre-matric applications to MahaDBT 2.0 at mahadbt2.maharashtra.gov.in from 1 June 2026, and the new portal publishes the current year's opening and closing dates on its notice board. Because these dates have been extended more than once in the past, read the portal's own notice before concluding that you have missed the year.

Where do I complain?

• MahaDBT helpline 1800 120 8040 for portal, login and application problems.
• Other Backward Bahujan Welfare Department, Annex Building 139, First Floor, Mantralaya, Madam Cama Road, Hutatma Rajguru Chowk, Mumbai 400032, and online at obcbahujankalyan.maharashtra.gov.in.
• Assistant Commissioner for Social Welfare in your district, which is the right office once your college has verified the application but no sanction has been recorded.
• Your institute's scholarship section first, for anything still showing as pending at institute level.

Applying is free at every stage. No official can charge you to sanction a freeship, and no genuine officer will ever ask for the one-time password sent to your phone.