The National Scholarship Portal and CUET both publish a single official FAQ document with a table of numbers in it. You can link to it, quote it, and trust it until the next admission cycle. State scholarship portals don’t work that way. UP, Bihar, MP, and Maharashtra’s MahaDBT are each run by a different state department, the size limits live inside help-desk circulars and portal pop-ups rather than one indexed PDF, and the numbers get revised between academic years with no changelog anywhere. When we tried to load the official upload-guideline pages directly while researching this piece, several returned server errors to an automated request — which is itself part of the problem: there’s no stable, linkable source to point a reader to the way there is for NSP.
What follows is what’s actually findable right now, sourced from portal walkthroughs, help-desk guides, and document-prep sites that track each state’s current requirements, not from one clean government FAQ. Where a number shows up consistently across sources we say so plainly. Where it doesn’t, we say that too, rather than presenting a single figure as more certain than it is.
UP Scholarship (scholarship.up.gov.in)
The number that shows up most consistently for Uttar Pradesh’s scholarship portal is 200KB per document — income certificate, caste certificate, marksheets, bank passbook scan, domicile certificate, all generally expected to land at or under that figure. Photographs are a separate, much tighter limit: commonly cited at under 20KB, and the format requirement is strict about JPG/JPEG only, not PDF.
UP’s portal is also known for being unforgiving about the exact figure — guides describing it note that exceeding the stated size “even slightly” gets the file rejected outright, with no partial-upload or retry-with-warning behavior. That matches the general pattern of Indian government portals: the validation is a hard cutoff, not a suggestion.
Bihar: e-Kalyan and Medhasoft
Bihar is a good example of why this roundup exists instead of one page per state — there isn’t one Bihar scholarship portal, there are at least two active systems, and they don’t agree on a number.
On the e-Kalyan portal, guidance varies by document type and by which source you check: some circulars describe graduation certificates and similar PDFs as needing to be 500KB or under, while more specific per-document guidance for things like Aadhaar, marksheets, and caste/income certificates points to 200KB. Photographs are commonly listed at under 50KB (200×230px) and signatures at under 20KB (140×60px).
On Medhasoft, the portal used for a separate set of Bihar scholarship schemes, the commonly cited ceiling is 400KB per PDF document, with oversized or wrong-format files named as a frequent cause of upload errors.
If you’re applying through a Bihar scheme, the practical takeaway is to check which of the two portals your specific scheme actually runs on before assuming a number — “Bihar scholarship” isn’t one system with one limit.
MP Scholarship Portal and MPTAAS
Madhya Pradesh has the same two-systems problem as Bihar. MPTAAS (the tribal affairs department’s portal) is the one with the most specific figures attached to it: 200KB per document is cited repeatedly, with photograph under 100KB and signature under 50KB called out separately, and Aadhaar card scans specifically named at under 200KB in PDF.
The broader MP Scholarship Portal — now being rolled out as “MP Scholarship Portal 2.0” at hescholarship.mp.gov.in, with scholarshipportal.mp.nic.in as an older/alternate address — is the one covering the wider set of higher-education scholarship schemes, and the figure that turns up for it is looser: documents generally under 1MB, in PDF or JPEG.
So a 200KB target is the safer bet if you know you’re on MPTAAS specifically; if you’re on the general MP Scholarship Portal for a different scheme, you likely have more room, but we’d rather say “check which portal you’re actually on” than flatten two different systems into one number.
MahaDBT (mahadbt.maharashtra.gov.in)
Maharashtra’s MahaDBT is the tightest of the four by a wide margin in what’s documented. The figure that comes up for general uploads is a 250KB maximum, with one specific callout for identity proof, address proof, birth proof, and relationship proof PDFs needing to be under 256KB. Photo and signature files are listed far smaller than the other three states’ portals — JPEG/JPG between 5KB and 20KB, with a required photo width of 160px and height between 200–212px. MahaDBT also runs its own cropping tool (icrop.mahaonline.gov.in) for applicants whose photos don’t already match those dimensions.
That 250–256KB range is tighter than UP’s 200KB document cap only by a little, but the photo/signature range — 5 to 20KB — is genuinely strict, tighter than anything on the other three portals. A photo that looks fine at 35KB on a UP or Bihar upload field can still bounce on MahaDBT.
Rejections that have nothing to do with file size
Before you assume a bounced upload is a compression problem, rule out the two causes that look identical to “file too large” but aren’t.
The PDF is password-protected and the widget can’t even open it to check. Documents downloaded straight from UIDAI’s e-Aadhaar service ship locked with a password (usually the first four letters of your name plus your birth year), and a locked file that a scholarship portal’s upload field can’t read gets rejected the same way an oversized one does — no useful error message either way. If that’s what’s happening, Unlock PDF removes the password in your browser before you compress the file, so the size fix and the lock issue don’t get tangled together.
The document isn’t actually a PDF yet — it’s a photo. Photograph a certificate on your phone and you’ve got a JPG, not a PDF, and a field asking specifically for a PDF will reject it regardless of how small the JPG is. JPG to PDF converts it first, entirely in your browser, and then Compress PDF can take it the rest of the way to your target KB number.
Neither of these is size-related, and no amount of re-compressing fixes them — they need the format fixed first, not the file shrunk further.
Hitting any of these with a custom target, not a preset
None of these four numbers — UP’s 200KB, Bihar’s 200–500KB range, MP’s 200KB or 1MB depending on portal, MahaDBT’s 250–256KB — match Compress PDF’s four built-in one-tap presets, which are tuned to NSP (200KB), DU CSAS (300KB), JoSAA (500KB), and a general under-1MB target. That’s fine — the tool isn’t limited to those four buttons. Below the presets is a plain number field where you type any exact KB or MB figure and it becomes the target.
To use it: open Compress PDF, drop in your scanned document, and instead of tapping a preset chip, type the number your state’s portal actually asked for — 200 for UP or MPTAAS, 250 for MahaDBT, 500 for e-Kalyan’s looser documents, whatever your scheme’s upload field specifies. The tool renders each page, re-encodes it as JPEG at decreasing quality levels until it fits your number, and tells you honestly if a target genuinely can’t be hit without the result turning illegible — it won’t hand you a “successful” file that’s actually unreadable. Everything happens in the browser via JavaScript, so an Aadhaar card, caste certificate, or income proof never leaves your device to get compressed; there’s no upload step to the tool itself and no account to create.
If a certificate hits that wall — usually a multi-page income or caste certificate with an annexure, dense enough that no quality level clears the target without the print blurring — the fix is upstream of compression, not deeper into it. Best Scan Settings for PDF Uploads covers the DPI and color-mode choices that keep a fresh scan small to begin with, and if you’ve already scanned in color, Grayscale PDF converts the existing file before you compress it, which often buys enough headroom on its own.
One habit worth building regardless of which state portal you’re on: type a number slightly under the stated limit, not exactly at it. If the portal says 200KB, aim for 180–190KB. Different browsers and operating systems round file sizes slightly differently, and a file that reads as “200KB” on your laptop can land a few hundred bytes over on the server’s own count — enough to bounce an upload that looked fine locally.
And because none of these four state portals publish one stable, dated FAQ the way NSP does, treat every number above as a starting point, not a guarantee. Check your specific portal’s current upload instructions — the pop-up text on the document field itself is usually the most current source — before you finalize a document, especially if you’re applying in a new academic year or through a scheme you haven’t used before.
If you’re also applying through a central scheme
State scholarships are rarely the only form in play. A lot of applicants juggle a state portal alongside NSP, and some are compressing the same certificates a second time for a CUET or DU registration, or a JoSAA counselling round, a few weeks later. The number changes each time, but the approach doesn’t: Compress PDF for NSP Scholarship Uploads covers the 200KB figure NSP’s own FAQ publishes, Compress PDF to 200KB for CUET Document Upload and DU CSAS Document Upload cover the two admission steps that often follow, and Compress PDF for JoSAA Counselling Uploads covers the looser 1MB figure on the engineering counselling side. If you’ve already been bounced by an upload and aren’t sure the cause was size at all, My PDF Was Rejected for Wrong File Size walks through the other usual suspects.