New Delhi, Dec. 13: India’s brightest students who choose to pursue science in college will get Rs 80,000 a year under a government scholarship to draw youngsters to careers in research.

The department of science and technology (DoT) today launched the nation’s largest-ever project to wean high-school students away from dreams of studying engineering or medicine towards BSc and MSc degrees.

Students who rank within 10,000 in the IIT Joint Entrance Examination and within 20,000 in the All India Engineering Entrance Examination but still choose BSc will be eligible for the scholarship, announced earlier this year but formally launched by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today. Students who clear the central medical entrance exam but opt for BSc will also be eligible.

All students who come within the top 1 per cent both in the 10th and 12th standard exams of central or state boards may also apply for the Scholarship for Higher Education. The department of science expects to offer 10,000 scholarships every year.

Students of Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs) and the National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER), national science talent scholars and Olympiad medallists will also be eligible.

The scholarship will be available from BSc second year till the students complete their master’s. Students of IISER Pune, Calcutta, Mohali, Bhopal and Thiruvananthapuram will receive it this year. So will those of NISER Bhubaneswar.

“Knowledge and innovation... are the keys to competitiveness and wealth creation,” Singh said at the launch of the project, christened INSPIRE (Innovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired Research).

He said India’s increased investments in science and technology would require matching efforts to increase the nation’s absorption capacity within the science and technology system.

The project will also award Rs 5,000 every year to 200,000 students from classes VI to X — picked with help from the schools’ science faculties — for work on a school-level science project. It will provide doctoral fellowships and an assured five-year research career to postgraduate students.

The government will spend Rs 2,100 crore on the scheme in the next three years.

India’s science policy makers have long worried about the migration of meritorious students towards, traditionally, engineering and medicine and, in recent years, management and information technology. “This initiative is important for India from a long-term perspective,” said T. Ramasamy, DoT secretary. “We expect to begin seeing gains from this in about a decade or so from now.”