Talentchain Eases process of scholarships, stipends, grants, Student Loans for the Govt & Financial Institutions

Given the low literacy rates and earning disparity within the developed countries like the Indian subcontinent, govt aids and scholarships are boon for students belonging to the weaker sections of the society, who are unable to pursue their education for some reason or the other. Scholarship is an incentive as well as encouragement for students, who are talented, but do not have the means to study further.

Govt of India has a Central Sector Scheme of Scholarship for College and University Students, where it pays Rs. 10,000/- per annum for the first three years and Rs. 20,000/- per annum for the fourth and fifth year, for meritorious students having family income of less than Rs.6 lakh per annum. The current process to apply for scholarship is to use Aadhaar — the India specific Universal Identity and the associated certificate issued by the Govt. Department in a form in Government portals. Now if this is a continuing scholarship, the candidate needs to upload the last certificate (e.g. for obtaining the 4th year scholarship in an engineering college, the 3rd year pass certificate needs to be shared) to get the current year’s scholarship.

Now, managing this complex process of validating the certificate from the issuing authority and then validating the details of the candidate eligibility and finally paying the amount into the student’s bank account takes a very long time and many a times it doesn’t even reach on time, making it very tough for this candidate. Taking advantage of this complex business process that are not being in sync, students and even colleges try to fraudulently apply with dubious certificate to get the scholarship & grants from Govt.

Just a few months back a college from Ghaziabad, a city near Delhi, was suspected to have made crores after bagging government scholarships by producing lists of fake student certificates. In 2013, an investigation into a minor complaint of misappropriation of funds disbursed under the scholarship scheme meant for tribal students, exposed a multi-crore scam spanning across Madhya Pradesh, India. And this is not for developing countries, even in US & Europe, there are companies who fraud people by letting admitted students fall to the trap of too-good to be true scholarships. These companies take an initial fee/deposit and also a processing fee and after it has been deposited they just stop communicating or say that the scholarship application is rejected by the trust, which gives the scholarship.

We believe that through Talentchain we can stop this phenomenon. First of all, Talentchain can provide a single platform for issuance and storage of education certificates for a large number of institutes, education boards who can issue them through their own logins. As Talentchain is on public Ethereum with the security of private chain through IBFT and IPFS, we can have govt nodes as verifiers who can search for a certificate for its truthfulness and originality through a simple Yes and No and pass that that information to the financial authority who disburses the money. Through the carefully chosen notary manning the notary nodes, a certificate even when not issued by an issuer on Blockchain can be verified and shared with the scholarship issuing body. We see a large number of education loan providers to also use this function for granting education loans in the beginning of the course and then also use it later when they need to disburse loan installment during the course of study as in many cases there are minimum grades that student needs to achieve to get the installments.

Talentchain can even dis-intermediate the Scholarship orchestrating bodies (who in many cases don’t follow the right principles) if it can bring private charity and grants organization on its verified network and open its large network of verified students and their needs through a Scholarship Marketplace. It can even ask for Grants requested by verified Institutes for Labs, Center of Excellence or Chairs. And with its TalentTo tokens the transactions can be made across geographies to make it a true decentralized talent scholarship marketplace.