Sixty-one scholars, four districts, one afternoon

Sixty-one scholars, forty-two of them girls, received merit scholarships at the Warangal collectorate auditorium last month. Fourteen of them travelled more than a hundred kilometres to be there and eleven had never been to Warangal city before. The scholarships this year total ₹8,84,000, funded by The Rangaraju Family Foundation and by 340 individual donors. Forty-eight awards are for intermediate at ₹12,000 and thirteen are for degree courses at ₹24,000. Disbursement goes directly to the institution and to the student's own account, in two instalments. The most useful ten minutes of the afternoon were not on the programme. A 2021 scholar, now in her final year of B.Sc. Nursing, was asked to say a few words and instead told the room what the scholarship had not covered: that ₹12,000 had paid her fees and hostel, and that she had spent her first two months at college unable to join the WhatsApp group where all the class material was shared, because she did not have a phone. We have added a one-time ₹6,000 device grant for first-year scholars from this cycle. It should have been obvious. It was not obvious to anyone in our office, and it took a scholar with a microphone to say it out loud.