Vishesh* is studying for his Master of Arts in social work. This is his first time away from his home in Buldhana district, Maharashtra. His parents are farmers, with an annual income of INR 2,00,000. He is the first person from his family to ever pursue a postgraduate degree.
Twice a week, Vishesh wakes up before sunrise to take the local train to Karjat, 70 km east of Mumbai, for his fieldwork with a livelihoods- and disability-focused nonprofit. The journey costs him INR 50 weekly. The fieldwork allowance provided to cover travel and food almost always falls short. To cover his expenses, he often skips dinner in the college dining hall, saving INR 50 each week.
Vishesh, who belongs to a Scheduled Tribe community, was eligible for the Government of India’s Post-Matric Scholarship. In recent years, the scholarship has undergone several changes: Other Backward Classes (OBC) students are no longer eligible for it, and administration of funds has shifted from central to state governments, with each state now maintaining its own policies, eligible colleges, and disciplines. This fragmentation, coupled with one-time scholarships, varying scholarship amounts, delay in disbursement period, and bureaucratic challenges, has made it increasingly difficult for students from marginalised backgrounds to navigate the financial costs of pursuing higher education.
In colleges across India, there are many first-generation students with similar stories of navigating basic financial requirements.
Why scholarships in India fail marginalised students
Most scholarships in India, including the post-matric scholarships by central and state governments, are designed as short-term, one-time interventions. Funds are typically disbursed for a single academic year, or even a single semester, with little assurance of continuity. For students enrolled in multi-year degrees, this creates a persistent state of uncertainty. This leaves students repeatedly anxious about finances in the next term or year, rather than enabling any kind of long-term academic planning.
When financial support is episodic, students are forced to make trade-offs: prioritising part-time work over academic engagement, delaying coursework, or resorting to high-interest loans. These coping mechanisms mirror the scholarships themselves—short-term and one-time—and compound both the financial and opportunity costs for a first-generation learner, increasing risks of low learning outcomes and dropouts.
Most mainstream scholarship programmes, whether public or private, do not embed mentorship, peer learning, or alumni engagement into their design.
First-generation learners from marginalised backgrounds have to match the academic journey and rigour of their peers. But they must also navigate invisible barriers of language, decode unfamiliar academic norms and expectations, manage academic relationships, and find ways of accessing academic opportunities—all while settling into a culturally new and financially daunting setup. For those students without family or social networks that have prior exposure to higher education, this generates a ‘first-generation tax’: the constant efforts required to learn socio-cultural and institutional skills that others inherit informally.
In this context, financial aid without relational support remains inherently limited. A one-time financial scholarship is not designed to patiently listen to students’ queries, answer questions about which journals to read, how to apply for a research grant, or how to conduct sensitive fieldwork in one’s own community. Most mainstream scholarship programmes, whether public or private, do not embed mentorship, peer learning, or alumni engagement into their design. These forms of guidance travel through mentorship and peer networks, not formal funding mechanisms.
The social science problem
The problem is not limited to how scholarships are designed; it also extends to how funding, both public and private, is distributed across disciplines. According to the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2021–22, enrolment in arts and social sciences is more than twice that of engineering, yet private scholarship funding has not followed this pattern. As a result, students pursuing arts, humanities, and social sciences face a much narrower funding landscape despite representing a much larger share of higher education enrolment.
This matters beyond individual access. In a political climate where spaces for free inquiry around human rights, environmental justice, and equality are under pressure, social science scholars become more, not less, relevant. When financial precarity pushes students from marginalised communities out of these disciplines, the knowledge produced from such spaces risks becoming disconnected from the realities it tries to address. Strengthening funding for first-generation learners in social sciences is therefore not just a question of individual access to higher education. It is a question of representation, one that shapes the quality and relevance of public discourse and decision-making.
What a different model could look like
In the current absence of long-term support for social-science students from marginalised communities, peer-led, participatory community models can function as crucial safety nets as well as long-term support and advocacy channels. This can be achieved by focusing on:
1. Promoting community-led scholarship models
Community-led, participatory scholarship models like the Bridge Scholarship (which the author founded) and the Karta Scholarship by the Karta Initiative begin with a shift in how support is imagined. Such scholarships are not treated merely as financial instruments, but as the foundation of sustained systems of support that recognise education as a right requiring long-term investment. Instead of positioning donors as distant benefactors and students as isolated recipients, these models focus on building networks of learners connected by shared values, disciplines, and lived experiences.
In practice, this often involves enabling individuals and collectives to shape scholarships around particular fields of study, identity groups, or social locations—such as first-generation learners or students pursuing underfunded yet socially critical disciplines like public health, rural development, or social work. This participatory design fosters a sense of shared ownership and accountability, while recognising that educational priorities are shaped as much by personal histories as by institutional pathways.
A central feature of these models is their emphasis on lived experience. Students from marginalised communities should have equitable access to any discipline they choose, including STEM. At the same time, representation in the social sciences matters because these disciplines shape research and policy on inequality, livelihoods, education, and governance. Yet the communities most affected by these issues remain underrepresented among the researchers who produce this knowledge. As a result, the evidence that informs policy often lacks the perspectives and experiences of the people it seeks to serve.
2. Building relationships with peers and donors
Equally important is how these models redefine the relationship between donors and students. Participation moves beyond a one-time financial transaction to a sustained engagement. We have seen this happen firsthand at Bridge, where a donor who funded an LL.M. (Master of Laws) scholarship for a student, continued to mentor them through the year and helped them successfully prepare for the Supreme Court of India’s Law Clerk-cum-Research Associate Examination. Donors often remain connected to the scholars they support, not as evaluators, but as collaborators invested in their journeys. At the same time, students are not framed as passive beneficiaries, but as active members of a learning community with agency and voice.
By prioritising relationships alongside resources, community-led scholarship models generate connections that extend well beyond formal funding cycles.
These relationships extend beyond the duration of formal funding. As students progress and eventually graduate, they remain connected to one another as alumni, forming networks that cut across institutions, cities, and countries. Over time, these networks become a form of social capital. Graduates can seek guidance, opportunities, and solidarity from peers who share similar educational journeys and structural challenges. Many return as mentors themselves, creating support systems in which a master’s student is guided by a doctoral candidate, who in turn is supported by a young professional.
These networks offer support at moments of transition, moving to a new city, entering the workforce, or pursuing further study, when institutional support often falls away. In this sense, the scholarship does not end at graduation. It evolves into a long-term ecosystem of mutual support, sustained by the very community it helped create.
By prioritising relationships alongside resources, community-led scholarship models generate connections that extend well beyond formal funding cycles. Scholars who benefit from support are not positioned as perpetual recipients, but as future contributors to the same ecosystems that enabled their education. This strengthens the resilience and reach of such models, and reimagines scholarships as collective investments in knowledge, leadership, and social change.
3. Providing multi-year support
The most consequential aspect of a scholarship is often not the amount of financial support, but its continuity. Multi-year commitments provide predictability across the duration of a degree, allowing students to plan their academic trajectories without the recurring anxiety of whether support will be renewed. This stability is particularly critical in the social sciences, where degrees often involve fieldwork, internships, and extended periods of study that are not easily compatible with paid employment. For a student like Vishesh, the question is not just whether support exists, but whether it will still be there in the second year of his degree.
When support is not contingent on annual reapplications or short-term performance metrics, students are better placed to take academic risks and pursue opportunities that don’t offer immediate financial returns but matter for long-term development.
As debates around access to higher education continue, particularly in the social sciences, it is worth reconsidering what effective support looks like. Alongside sustained advocacy for stronger public investment in higher education, community-led scholarship models offer one way of reimagining support—grounded in relationships, shared responsibility, and trust. When designed with participation and continuity at their core, these programmes help ensure that those most affected by social and economic policies are also able to study, critique, and shape them. In doing so, they contribute to building educational ecosystems that support learners beyond enrolment, and knowledge systems that are more inclusive, grounded, and responsive to the realities they seek to address.
*Name changed to maintain confidentiality.
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Know more
- Learn about how community-based spaces run by marginalised students are filling gaps left by formal institutions.
- Read more about how declining funding is pushing social science out of India’s higher education system.
