Govt's new portal to assist students with loans and scholarships

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Department of Financial Services, Ministry of Finance, Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development and Indian Banks’ Association (IBA) have joined hands to launch a web portal to provide loans and scholarship assistance to students.

The portal, www.vidyalakshmi.co.in provides students single window access to information on educational loans provided by the banks.

Students can apply to multiple banks for loans and can get a dashboard view on the status of their loan application. The provision to send queries and grievances are also there. The website is linked to National Scholarship Portal as well.

So far, 13 Banks have registered 22 Educational Loan Schemes on the Vidya Lakshmi Portal and 5 Banks - SBI, IDBI Bank, Bank of India, Canara Bank and Union Bank of India have integrated their system with the Portal for providing loan processing status to students.