  Pulsars have been primarily detected by their narrow pulses or periodicity in
time domain data. Interferometric surveys for pulsars are challenging due to
the trade-off between beam sensitivity and beam size and the corresponding
tradeoff between survey sensitivity (depth), sky coverage, and computational
efforts. The detection sensitivity of time-domain searches for pulsars is
affected by dispersion smearing, scattering, and rapid orbital motion of
pulsars in binaries. We have developed a new technique to select pulsar
candidates in interferometric radio images by identifying scintillating sources
and measuring their scintillation bandwidth and timescale. Identifying likely
candidates allows sensitive, focused time-domain searches, saving computational
effort. Pulsar scintillation is independent of its timing properties and hence
offers a different selection of pulsars compared to time-domain searches.
Candidates identified from this method could allow us to find hard-to-detect
pulsars, such as sub-millisecond pulsars and pulsars in very compact,
highly-accelerated binary orbits. We use uGMRT observations in the fields of
PSR\,B1508+55, PSR\,J0437$-$4715, and PSR\,B0031$-$07 as test cases for our
technique. We demonstrate that the technique correctly differentiates between
the pulsar and other non-scintillating point sources and show that the
extracted dynamic spectrum of the pulsar is equivalent to that extracted from
the uGMRT phased array beam. We show the results from our analysis of known
pulsar fields and discuss challenges in dealing with interference and
instrumental effects.
