“Developed during the Smart India Hackathon where I served as the technical lead of a student engineering team, addressing a national-level challenge to modernize public scholarship disbursement through transparent digital workflows.”
— e-PMSSS Architecture Brief
e-PMSSS is a paperless scholarship administration system developed as part of the Smart India Hackathon (SIH). It streamlines the end-to-end disbursement workflow for the Prime Minister's Special Scholarship Scheme, replacing slow, physical paper trails with an authenticated, multi-tier digital verification pipeline.
The traditional PMSSS scholarship disbursement process involved physical paper forms, manual multi-departmental stamping, and physical courier transit between colleges, nodal verification centers, and state administrative offices. This resulted in processing backlogs of several months, lost documents, and lack of transparency for student beneficiaries.
Engineered an authenticated digital pipeline with role-tailored dashboards and sequential state-enforced approval checkpoints.
Student submits academic proofs and banking details via React frontend.
College nodal officer reviews records; signs off with verified status.
State administrator audits cross-college batches and authorizes disbursement.
Immutable timestamped audit entries generated for every state change.
Multi-Role RBAC & Middleware Guards
Engineered secure Express.js middleware pipelines validating role claims from cryptographically signed JWTs, ensuring officials can only access and approve applications within their jurisdiction.
State Machine for Approval Workflows
Modeled application lifecycles as a formal state machine in MongoDB, ensuring applications cannot skip intermediate verification steps or be approved without preceding audit sign-offs.
Relying on frontend UI guards to enforce sequential approvals creates security vulnerabilities if an API endpoint is hit directly.
Enforced validation in Express controllers ensuring state transitions can only execute if the application is in the exact prerequisite state.