The Union science ministry has decided to discontinue a prestigious fellowship scheme called the Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana for undergraduate and postgraduate science students, triggering reactions of surprise and disappointment among faculty members in top institutions.

The ministry’s Department of Science and Technology (DST) has announced it will not conduct the KVPY aptitude test from 2022 as the Yojana will be subsumed under INSPIRE, a larger scholarship scheme that some scientists say lacks transparency.

The KVPY — introduced by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1999 — has over the past five years awarded 250 to 350 scholarships each year to students who opt to join a BSc, BS, or integrated MSc or MS programme in natural sciences. The DST’s INSPIRE scholarships for higher education currently awards around 10,000 scholarships each year. Scholars in both schemes receive Rs 80,000 per year through undergraduate and postgraduate years.

Several faculty members are worried that the entry channels and selection process for INSPIRE will not be able to match the KVPY’s distinctive aptitude test and selection interview that had helped bring some of India’s most talented students into the sciences.

In a country where most 12th standard science students were under peer or parental pressure to pursue engineering or medicine in undergraduate years, the KVPY provided what some students and teachers say was an equally prestigious alternative for those keen on pure sciences.

Some teachers expressed disappointment on Twitter. “Very unfortunate that KVPY is gone and subsumed by INSPIRE. It’s like a long pleasant dream which suddenly turned into a nightmare,” posted V.R. Supradeepa, associate professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

The students selected for the KVPY would be invited to join the IISc’s four-year undergraduate science programme and the five-year integrated MS courses offered by the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER). They could also pursue BSc in any college of their choice in the country.

Ayan Banerjee, professor of physics at IISER, Calcutta, also described the DST decision as “nightmarish”. In a tweet, he said the KVPY had provided the IISERs some of their best students. “I am shocked beyond words,” he wrote.

Students eligible for INSPIRE include those within the top 1 per cent of their Class XII board merit list, within 10,000 ranks in the Joint Entrance Exam for the Indian Institutes of Technology, or within 20,000 ranks of the All India Engineering Entrance Exam.

But the INSPIRE process is not very transparent, said Aniket Sule, associate professor and astrophysicist at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Mumbai. “If you satisfy the eligibility criteria, you send the application and you’re informed whether you’ve been awarded the scholarship or not. To the outside world, there is no merit list. On what basis are the 10,000 students selected from the much larger pool of eligible candidates is unclear.”

A query sent by this newspaper to the DST seeking a response to concerns expressed by faculty members has evoked no response.

Sections of faculty and students said the KVPY’s aptitude test and interview were designed to assess students’ grasp of concepts and fundamentals in contrast to the JEE or the AIEEE that are primarily focused on problem-solving.

“The KVPY was one of the options through which students interested in basic sciences could get into the IISc or the IISERs without having to get into the cut-throat rat race of the JEE,” said a KVPY fellow and undergraduate student at the IISc.

Amid such concerns, however, Sule said his opinion remained divided. “Multiple exams such as the KVPY give students multiple chances to succeed, so they don’t lose out due to some freak failure on the single exam day,” he said. “On the other hand, we know high-stake multiple-choice exams tend to favour only a certain demographic section of students — a vast majority of competent students lose out because they are not trained to crack such exams.”

“The students the KVPY selected were undoubtedly talented, but they were not necessarily the most talented in their age group,” Sule said. “INSPIRE is more democratic. The fellowship is given in such large numbers that you cover not just exam-tuned students but other genuine aspirants too.”