Paytm's Scholarship Programme for Engineering Students

From January 2017, commerce platform Paytm will offer a #StartInCollege scholarship programme to engineering students. Students pursuing engineering programme who have enrolled on digital incubator startup village or SV.CO's website will be eligible for this scholarship.

Details of the scholarship

• This programme will select students as teams from engineering colleges through a coding and video challenge
• The company will conduct 2 rounds of selection process, preliminary and final round
• The group of students who have been selected in the final round will be taken through a 6 month programme involving ideation, prototyping and customer validation
• The company hopes to foster upcoming entrepreneurs looking to launch their startups in Silicon Valley along with SV.CO, which is a guided target-based system for learning to create great startups
• Students who need financial assistance will be offered the scholarships. Besides that, as part of the programme, they will be given on-demand assistance over real-time messaging.
• The course will begin in January 2017 and conclude by June. Each Paytm scholarship will include the entire course fee of Rs 37,500 for the six-month programme.
• Upon completion of this course, the students will also be given specialisation certificate in association with Gujarat Technological University (GTU)
• It will facilitate access to industry leaders over the Office Hour (video chat) platform; launch the product in Facebook's Silicon Valley headwaters

"Once enrolled in the programme, students can interact with customers and use insights to build great products and prototypes. For university certification, there are partnerships with university boards that offer a degree on completion of the six-month SV.CO programme. Founders of the companies will receive targets that they either complete individually or as a team," quoted Shankar Nath, senior vice president, Paytm.

"The programme actively looks out for teams involving women, but doesn't have special schemes that provide monetary encouragement for female startup heads. Of the total batch strength, close to 40 per cent constituted female entrepreneurs," added Nath.