In a Rajya Sabha session on 3rd December 2015 , Smt. Smriti Irani , Union Human Resource Development Minister, replied to a question that for academic year 2015-2016, an amount of Rs. 70.00 crore has been allocated under National Means-cum-Merit Scholarship Scheme targeting estimated number of beneficiaries of 205000 against the number of the last year 96521 sanctioned scholarships with Rs 58.61 crore.
For quick processing and sanctioning of the scholarship proposals , A National e-Scholarship portal has been made operational since October 2015 for the State / UT Governments to submit online scholarship forms under Prime Minister’s Digital India Initiative. This online project is currently maintained by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY). She also replied that for the academic year 2015-16, many scholarships did not yet sanction because of non-receive of proposals disbursement letters from States/ UT Governments.