APNA Field Dispatch | May 2026 APNA Aapke Dwar
May was a month of showing up.
Our teams laced up their shoes and walked lane by lane, basti by basti across ten slum clusters in Ranchi. The goal was simple but not easy: to see, document, and understand the lives of families that often go uncounted.
Counting the Uncounted
Across Wards 5, 6, 12, 27, 37 and 41 — from Lame Bargain Basti to Valmiki Nagar, from Lawadih to Lanka Colony — our teams knocked on doors and sat with families. By the end of the month, we had documented 988 families and 4,638 individuals.
The numbers, when they came in, told a quiet but urgent story. More than half the people surveyed had never been to school or had only scraped through the basics. Seven in ten households had children. Nearly 2,500 people across these homes were dependents leaning on someone else, with little room for error.
We asked families about their health, their children, what they eat, how they earn, whether they have an Aadhaar card or a ration card or any card at all. The answers will take time to fully understand. But they will shape everything we do next.
Teaching the Community to Speak for Itself
On 25th May, in the lanes of Bar Jhopri, Jagannathpur, something quieter but equally important happened.
Thirteen women and young people from the community sat down together for a day of training as Green Paralegal Volunteers people who would go back into their own neighbourhoods and help families navigate a world of schemes, documents, and rights that can feel very far away.
Project Coordinator Sapna Gupta put it plainly: the government runs dozens of schemes for people exactly like the ones sitting in that room. But awareness doesn't travel the last mile on its own. Someone has to carry it there. That is what a Green PLV does.
Project Manager Mohammad Faizan walked participants through schemes like PM Vishwakarma, SVANidhi, and MUDRA : not as a policy lecture, but as a practical toolkit. Lav Kumar, a local Pragya Kendra operator, joined in to show how digital documentation actually works, step by step.
By the end of the day, the thirteen volunteers in that room weren't just participants. They were a resource for their neighbours, their lanes, and their community. To read more about the training click here.
Learnings
Mapping nearly a thousand families taught us that data is only as good as the trust that makes people share it. And a day's training reminded us that the most powerful thing we can do is build capacity from within not bring answers from outside, but help communities find their own voice.
May set the foundation. The months ahead are about building on it.
Team APNA | Jharkhand | May 2026