About 150 scholarships will be granted by the Bank this year. The application for scholarship can be accessed on https://www.idfcfirstbank.com/csr-new/mba-scholarship.html.
The last date for applying for this scholarship is July 31, 2020, the bank said in a statement.
The scholarship programme aims to financially support students from weaker social economic backgrounds, enabling them to pursue a management degree from a B-school of their choice.
To qualify for the scholarship, the candidate needs to secure admission into a two-year full-time MBA programme and the family income has to be less than Rs 6 lakhs per annum.
The initiative provides financial assistance to students so as to ease the burden of fees payable by them and to make admission to the best colleges and universities accessible to economically weaker students.
IDFC FIRST Bank CSR Head Rachana Iyer said: “We believe expenses of MBA are rather high and even meritorious students often drop out from pursuing their careers because of financial difficulties.”
Through this initiative, the bank wants to lend a shoulder with Rs 2 lakh per student for two years, to students from vulnerable communities, to pursue higher education and to attain a higher standard of living.
The scholarship supports students from over 150 B-Schools all across India. Since the number of applications far exceed the number of scholarships, the Bank prioritises and ranks-orders the applications for scholarships based on criticality of need, which may involve factors such as family income, socio-economic background and other such criteria.
The MBA Scholarship programme was instituted as a CSR initiative by erstwhile Capital First in 2016 and continued after the merger which resulted in the formation of IDFC FIRST Bank. So far, 530 students from both urban and rural India have benefitted from this programme.
These students belong to diverse family backgrounds with parents being retired lower-income scale government employees, auto-rickshaw drivers, farmers and other such backgrounds.
As an extension of this programme, IDFC FIRST Bank also provides scholarships to students pursuing higher education or teaching in the mental health space, students with autism, students enrolled in the Young India Fellowship programme of Ashoka university, and to youth from shelter homes and underprivileged backgrounds.
