APNA's Flagship Initiatives

In the mining belts and climate-fragile landscapes of Jharkhand, communities often find themselves at the margins of both law and ecology. The Green Paralegal Volunteers (Green PLVs) Project emerged from APNA's belief that justice must shoot off from the ground like a sapling, taking nourishment from the people who live closest to the forests, rivers, and mines. The focus is on people who live and work in places affected by mining or facing ecological challenges.

This flagship initiative strengthens participatory environmental governance by building a bridge between affected communities and systems of justice. The Green PLVs, who are trained local leaders, act as both legal first responders and ecological stewards, helping their communities claim rights, access remedies, and engage in environmental decision-making.

The vision is to nurture a community-led network of Paralegal Volunteers who stand as accessible allies between marginalised communities and the systems of environmental, legal, and administrative justice. The PLVs are not only facilitators to the realisation of rights, but the co-creators in decisions that shape their lives, livelihoods, and shared environments.

The mission stands to build grassroots leadership by equipping community-based PLVs with legal and ecological literacy. This awareness is needed for the PLVs to act decisively in defence of within their rights to preserve their livelihoods and ecosystems. They create opportunities for affected individuals and communities to engage fruitfully with justice mechanisms, public institutions, and environmental governance.

Through thematic training, field deployments, and community awareness drives, the project creates a living network of environmental defenders. Green PLVs document violations, facilitate grievance redressal, and convene dialogue between communities, government, and the private sector. What sets PLVs apart is that they haven't just learned about the law, but that they've been officially recognised by the government under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987. Because they are local and known, people turn to them first whenever there's a problem, whether it's confusion about a government form, a dispute about land, or an issue with pollution or access to benefits.

By doing so, the project deepens accountability and transparency, turning environmental awareness into collective legal action. It directly contributes to India's commitments under the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDGs 13 (Climate Action), 15 (Life on Land), and 16 (Peace, Justice & Strong Institutions), and SDGs 10 (Reduced Inequalities). Green PLVs will be trained on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, focusing especially on the third pillar, which emphasises access to remedy. This means they will learn how to help communities understand and use fair and effective ways to seek justice and solutions when their rights are harmed by businesses or other actors.

The PLVs' involvement will help spread legal knowledge more widely and fairly, making sure that vulnerable groups like women, indigenous peoples, and informal workers aren't left behind as communities move toward sustainable and fair development for all. The result is a growing community movement: one where local voices shape the future of ecological justice.

Named after Article 21A of the Constitution, and inspired by principles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, is APNA's Project 21A. This project carries forward APNA's long-standing work to make the Right to Education (RTE) a lived reality for every child. The project brings law and life together, focusing especially on children from marginalised backgrounds in Jharkhand, those for whom education remains the most powerful route to dignity.

Project 21A works at the intersection of law, advocacy, and community mobilisation to strengthen the enforcement of the RTE Act (2009), particularly Section 12(1)(c), which guarantees 25% reservation for children from disadvantaged groups in private, unaided schools.

We focus on children from historically marginalised communities such as Adivasis, Pasmanda Muslims, Dalits, Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs), Other Backward Classes (OBCs), students with disabilities, and those from economically weaker sections. These children face multiple forms of discrimination and exclusion that prevent them from accessing their rights and receiving quality education. Apart from this, we work on critical issues like preventing child sexual abuse, fighting trafficking and bonded labour, ensuring juvenile justice, and creating environments that are safe and accessible for children with disabilities.

Our mission is clear: to ensure that every child not only enters school but also belongs there.

Through a combination of legal assistance, awareness campaigns, and capacity building, the project helps families navigate the complex processes of admission, documentation, and grievance redressal. Community volunteers track compliance, support parents in filing RTE applications, and engage local education departments to make the system accountable.

Its impact can be seen in growing enrolments, stronger School Management Committees, and a rising confidence among parents to demand what the law already promises: education as a right, not a privilege.

Knowledge is often produced about communities, not with them. The Participatory Learning & Practice (PLP) Lab was created to change how communities are left out of conversations and topics that directly impact them. PLP serves as APNA's research and knowledge wing, being a space where grassroots experience intersects policy, and where community wisdom becomes a tool for advocacy and reform. This initiative is designed to capture the real-life stories, experiences, and creative solutions of community members, development workers, and grassroots groups, and turn this knowledge into valuable resources that shape and improve policies and practices.

The Lab's participatory approach makes research a democratic act, helping bridge the gap between field realities and institutional policies. The PLP Lab transforms everyday struggles and successes into actionable knowledge through participatory research, co-authorship, and collaborative documentation. It produces learning materials, toolkits, white papers, shadow reports, and working papers, ensuring that community perspectives inform the design and implementation of development and legal frameworks. Here, learning is not a one-way street, but is reciprocal: researchers learn from communities as much as communities learn from the process.

Over time, the PLP Lab has evolved into a repository of participatory knowledge, strengthening community agency while providing credible evidence for advocacy. It stands as a testament to APNA's belief that meaningful change begins with listening and learning together.

In the narrow lanes of Jharkhand's towns and settlements reside families who build, clean, and sustain our cities. These include Safai Karamcharis, manual scavengers, construction workers, domestic workers, and others in the unorganised sector. Yet many among them continue to face barriers in accessing welfare benefits because they lack the necessary eligibility documents. The Until We Are Seen Initiative grew from this gap, from the everyday struggles of families trying to access rations, pensions, or health insurance, navigating the complex bureaucratic systems.

To access welfare schemes, citizens interact with the state multiple times through various procedures. A 2021 report by the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) found that the bureaucratic complexity of welfare enrollment deters over 40% of eligible families from applying for social schemes. APNA is supporting an institutional mechanism to make this interaction more accessible, efficient, and sustainable. We facilitate meaningful engagement between citizens and government authorities to help people access their legal entitlements. This support promotes open communication, cooperation, and transparency, ensuring everyone has a fair chance to claim their rights under the law.

The approach seeks to streamline procedural steps, strengthen documentation and verification processes, and ensure timely service delivery. The model aims to reduce procedural delays and enhance the overall efficiency of entitlement realisation for eligible beneficiaries by supporting standardised practices and capacity-building at the community level. All this will be done to ensure that those who contribute so much to the city are not left unseen within it.

Through micro-targeting vulnerable families and community mapping, door-to-door outreach, and local facilitation camps, the initiative helps families navigate the process of securing key eligibility documents, rights and entitlements. Much of this work is led by community-based paralegal volunteers: youth and women from within these very settlements who are trained to guide others, coordinate with government departments, and spread awareness about available schemes.

In cities like Ranchi, Hazaribagh, and Bokaro, these collective efforts have already helped hundreds of families begin the process of documentation. Each record made, each card received, becomes a step toward visibility and security.

Beyond the numbers, Until We Are Seen is about recognition in a deeper sense, about listening to people's stories, understanding their everyday hurdles, and building bridges of trust between communities and the state. It reminds us that inclusion begins not with paperwork alone, but with presence and persistence.