The first Scholarship award ceremony was held in 1981 at BMICH and scholarships were awarded to 422 students. Up to 2016, nearly 280,000 scholarships have been awarded to the students of universities and HEIs.

Scholarship awards are held annually. From the begging, awards of scholarship for students from the Colombo district were organized by the Mahapola Scholarship Trust Fund Secretariat and held in Colombo while the awards for students from other districts were organized by relevant District Secretariats.

Starting from 2012 the award ceremonies were held in respective universities. However, MTF has now decided to conduct the ceremonies at the district level in collaboration with universities and District Secretariats. As such scholarship awards for the academic year 2017/18 are to be held in the near future.

Merit scholarship recipients and ordinary scholarship recipients are paid Rs. 5,050/- and Rs. 5,000/- per month respectively subject to a maximum of 10 installments per one academic year during the prescribed duration of the course. Installments are directly credited to the bank accounts of students and students are notified of the payment via SMS.