Amader Para Amader Samadhan

What is Amader Para Amader Samadhan?

Amader Para Amader Samadhan, usually shortened to APAS and translating roughly as "our neighbourhood, our solution", is a participatory governance initiative of the Government of West Bengal run through the Panchayats and Rural Development Department. The Bengali name is written আমাদের পাড়া আমাদের সমাধান, and readers searching for it under that spelling are looking at the same programme.

The design idea is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly. Instead of a department deciding which lane needs paving and which hamlet needs a drain, APAS puts a fixed sum of Rs 10 lakh against every polling booth in the state and asks the people who live in that booth area to decide what it is spent on. With more than 80,000 polling booths in West Bengal, this amounts to nearly Rs 8,000 crore of works statewide.

According to the state government's APAS status note of 12 October 2025, the initiative "seeks to institutionalize participatory governance and reimagine grassroots service delivery" by inviting members of the community to APAS camps to deliberate on, identify and prioritise the works to be taken up for resolving "small but crucial link infrastructure gaps" affecting their locality and daily lives.

The unit of decision-making. The polling booth: is the whole point. A booth covers a few hundred households who genuinely share the same broken culvert or unlit lane, which is a far tighter geography than a gram panchayat and small enough that a public meeting can actually reach agreement.

Who takes part in Amader Para Amader Samadhan?

You can take part if:

• You live in the polling booth area where the camp is being held. Camps are organised booth by booth, and the residents of that booth are the deliberating body.
• You want to raise a local public infrastructure problem, a road, a drain, a water line, a street light, a small piece of community infrastructure.

You cannot apply, and are not eligible, if what you want is a personal benefit. This is the single most important thing to understand about APAS and the point on which readers most often go wrong:

• No individual receives money under APAS. The Rs 10 lakh is a works allocation for the booth area, not a grant to any person or household.
• There is no application form, no beneficiary list, and no eligibility certificate. Nobody is "selected" for APAS.
• A private asset cannot be funded. Repairs to your own house, boundary wall or private land are outside the scope, which is confined to shared local infrastructure.
• Residents of another booth cannot decide your booth's works, and you cannot claim your booth's allocation be spent somewhere else.

Anyone who is asked to pay a fee to "get their name added" to APAS, or told that a form must be bought, is being defrauded. The initiative has no such mechanism.

What kind of works does APAS fund?

The state's own accounting of what communities actually chose is the most useful guide here. Roads, street lighting, drainage and water supply together made up more than 80 per cent of all works prioritised in the community discussions held at APAS camps.

That concentration is telling. Given a free choice and a modest sum, neighbourhoods across West Bengal overwhelmingly picked the four things that determine whether daily life works: whether you can walk or ride out of your para, whether it floods, whether there is drinking water, and whether the lane is usable after dark. The remaining share went to other basic community infrastructure and sanitation works.

The Rs 10 lakh ceiling per booth is what shapes the scale. It is enough for a stretch of link road, a set of street lights, a drain, or a tubewell, and it is deliberately not enough for a large project, because APAS is aimed at gaps that are small but blocking.

How to apply under Amader Para Amader Samadhan, and why there is no individual form

1. Find the APAS camp for your own polling booth. Camps were scheduled booth by booth, with dates announced locally through the gram panchayat, the block office or the urban local body. Attending a camp for a different booth does not help, because each camp deliberates only on its own allocation.
2. Attend the camp and raise the problem. Bring a voter ID or ration card showing you belong to that booth, and describe the issue as specifically as you can, name the exact stretch of road, the particular drain, the lane that has no light. Vague requests are hard to convert into a work order.
3. Take part in the prioritisation. The camp deliberates and prioritises among the problems raised, because the Rs 10 lakh cannot cover everything. This is the stage where community agreement determines the outcome.
4. The prioritised schemes go to the block or urban area, which forwards them to the district for approval.
5. The district approves, tenders and issues work orders, after which execution begins on the ground.
6. Follow up through your gram panchayat or ward office using the scheme details recorded at the camp, to track whether your booth's work has moved from approval to tender to work order.

Because APAS camps also carried Duare Sarkar service delivery, a resident could use the same visit to file individual applications under other state schemes. Those are separate applications with their own documents and their own eligibility — APAS itself neither prescribes nor decides them.

How far had APAS progressed?

The Government of West Bengal published a consolidated status on 12 October 2025, which gives an unusually concrete picture of the initiative's scale.

Camps and attendance

• 31,700-plus camps were scheduled up to 3 November 2025.
• 28,299 camps had already been held as of 12 October 2025, covering almost 90 per cent of polling booths.
• More than 2.20 crore visitors had attended.
• North 24 Parganas held the most camps at 2,990, followed by South 24 Parganas at 2,349 and Murshidabad at 2,309.
• Paschim Medinipur drew the most visitors at 28.9 lakh, followed by South 24 Parganas at 21.5 lakh and Purba Bardhaman at 20.08 lakh. Paschim Medinipur also had the highest average attendance per camp at 1,931 visitors, ahead of Purba Bardhaman at 1,304 and Malda at 1,271.

The works pipeline

• Districts received more than 3.58 lakh schemes from blocks and urban areas.
• 2.84 lakh schemes had been approved for implementation.
• Tender processes had been initiated for 1.86 lakh schemes.
• Work orders had been issued for almost 10,000 schemes.
• Around 100 schemes were already complete.

Read in sequence, these five numbers show a funnel at a very early execution stage as of October 2025. A large volume of proposals approved, tendering well under way, and physical completion only just beginning.

Duare Sarkar delivery at APAS camps

• More than 94.7 lakh applications received.
• 77.4 lakh approved, a rate of 81.7 per cent.
• 56.66 lakh had final services delivered.

Key dates

• 2 August 2025: APAS camps began.
• 12 October 2025: date of the state government's published status note, the source of the figures above.
• 3 November 2025, scheduled end of the camp phase.

Camps in North Bengal districts affected by floods and landslides were rescheduled, and special outreach camps were organised in those areas for relief assistance and for re-issuing documents that people had lost in the disaster. A resident of an affected district who missed the original camp date should check locally for the rescheduled or outreach camp rather than assume the booth was skipped.

Where to raise a grievance about APAS

APAS has no individual claim to dispute, so grievances are almost always about execution, a work that was prioritised at the camp but has not started, or a work order issued for the wrong stretch. The escalation route follows the ordinary rural development chain:

• The gram panchayat office, or the ward office in an urban area, which holds the record of what the camp prioritised.
• The Block Development Office, which forwards schemes to the district.
• The District Magistrate's office, which approves schemes, runs the tender process and issues work orders.
• The Panchayats and Rural Development Department, Government of West Bengal.

When raising a grievance, quote the booth number and the scheme as it was recorded at the camp. Both the allocation and the approval are tracked at booth level, so that is the identifier the administration can actually search on.

Common reasons a work does not get taken up under APAS

APAS has no individual application to accept or reject, so nothing here works like a rejected form. What does happen, and what residents genuinely run into, is a proposal raised at the camp that never turns into a work order. The real reasons a proposed work stalls or drops out of the pipeline are specific to how the scheme is structured.

• The problem raised is a private asset, not shared infrastructure. APAS funds roads, drains, water lines and street lighting that serve the booth area in common. A request to repair a private house, a boundary wall or land that belongs to one household falls outside what the camp can prioritise, no matter how genuine the need.
• The proposal exceeds what Rs 10 lakh can realistically cover. The allocation is fixed per booth and has to be shared across everything the camp decides to fund. A large project, a full-length road resurfacing or a major drainage overhaul, competes for the same ceiling as every smaller request and is often the one deprioritised or scaled down at the camp discussion stage.
• The camp did not reach agreement on it. Because prioritisation happens through community deliberation at the booth level, a work that only a few residents raised, without wider support in the room, can lose out to problems more people agreed affect the whole neighbourhood.
• The location described was too vague to convert into a work order. A complaint like "our road is bad" without naming the exact stretch, or "we need lights" without naming the lane, is hard for the block office to turn into a specific, tenderable work. Proposals that name the precise stretch of road, the particular drain or the specific lane move forward; vague ones tend to sit unresolved.
• The work duplicates something already funded through another scheme. Roads, drains or water lines already covered under a separate rural development, PWD or municipal scheme are generally not funded twice through APAS, since the pipeline checks for this kind of overlap once a scheme reaches the district for approval.
• It falls in a district or block still working through a large backlog. Districts had received several times more proposed schemes than they had approved as of the government's October 2025 status note, and tendering was further behind approvals still. A work sitting in queue is not necessarily rejected; it may simply be behind others in the same block's processing order.
• The booth's camp was rescheduled and the proposal was never formally logged. In North Bengal districts affected by floods and landslides, camps were postponed and replaced with special outreach sessions. A problem raised informally outside a properly held camp, rather than recorded at the rescheduled or outreach camp itself, will not appear in the district's scheme list.

If a proposal raised at your booth's camp does not move to a work order, the fix is not to reapply, since there is no application to resubmit. It is to follow up with the gram panchayat or ward office that holds the camp record, confirm the problem was logged with a specific location, and ask which stage it is stuck at, deliberation, block forwarding, district approval or tender, so the right office can be pressed to move it forward.