EDUCATION
Scholarship for Higher Education–Social Sciences
“I am Nivetha S R, studying final year MSW (Community Development) at Madras School of Social Work. I am hailing from a lower middle class family, my father is a temporary staff in a private firm with less salary. My younger brother is also doing his collegiate education and my Father found it very difficult to pay our college fee. By God’s grace and with my hard work I got a merit seat in MSW and my father thought that I should not miss my education because of financial constraints.
I am from a village in Thiruvallur district and I travel nearly 90 kms and struggle for travel costs. The bus pass will not be useful most of the time as there are only a few MTC buses to our village from Poonamallee and per day it requires nearly 200 rupees if the pass couldn't be used. We actually struggled for daily bus fare. Also I go for fieldwork on Wednesdays and Thursdays every week. Bus passes can only be used in the particular route and so during fieldwork days, it cannot be used. Cognizant scholarship saved me in this situation. For the two academic years, it helped me bear the travel cost and other expenses such as stationery, photocopy etc.
I am so grateful to the Cognizant Foundation for giving financial support which helped me to fulfil my educational needs. I am happy to share to you that I am maintaining a very good academic record. I have secured first class with distinction in all the semesters (3). I have also cracked UGC-NET in December 2019 and I am eligible to become an Assistant Professor. I once again thank Cognizant Foundation for your great and timely help.”
To realize progressive societal and economic measures, India is in need of development professionals with the right skill set to stir desired changes in the development sector. To motivate the student community to pursue practice-based profession and earn an academic discipline in the development sector, CF started providing scholarship to deserving students pursuing higher studies in social sciences and development studies.
Initiated as a pilot program by CF in 2018, scholarships was provided to fifty students pursuing Post Graduate Study in Social Work (MSW) with selected specializations. Few of the beneficiary institutions are Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Central University of Rajasthan, Tezpur University, College of Social Work, Nirmala Niketan, Madras School of Social Work, Rajagiri College of Social Sciences.
Based on the growing interest, CF has on boarded new institutions like The Maharaja Sayajirao University Baroda, University of Rajasthan, University of Kashmir etc., to the scholarship programme and has considerably increased the number of annual scholarships from 50 to 90 from 2019.
