APPSC ASWO Syllabus and Exam Pattern (Degree Standard)

APPSC ASWO Updated: 03 Sep 2026

Syllabus

APPSC's published scheme for this post is two objective written papers and then an interview: Paper-1 General Studies, 150 marks and 150 questions in 150 minutes; Paper-2 Subject, 300 marks and 150 questions in 150 minutes; and Part-B interview, 50 marks.

Download Official Syllabus PDF

The PDF opens on the official site. Every topic in it is explained in plain language below — you do not have to open the PDF to read the syllabus.

Compiled from the official syllabus · check it against the official link

Part-A written papers and Part-B interview: the whole scheme ↑

The document that governs this post is a scheme and syllabus sheet, not a recruitment notification, and it is written for three posts at once: Assistant Tribal Welfare Officers, B.C. Welfare Officer and Social Welfare Officers. All three are examined at degree standard and in objective type. Whatever else changes when a recruitment is finally announced, this is the paper structure the Commission currently publishes for the post.

One structural fact is worth acting on before you open a single book: Paper-2 carries twice the marks of Paper-1 for the same number of questions and the same amount of time. Each Paper-2 question is therefore worth two marks against one in Paper-1. That per-question figure is our own division of the printed marks by the printed question count and is DERIVED — the document does not print it. In plain terms, an hour spent on Paper-2 buys you what two hours on Paper-1 would.

Part-B is the interview and is worth 50 marks. The sheet gives it no duration, no question count and no syllabus of its own.

Part	Paper	Marks	Questions	Duration
Part-A: Written (Objective Type)	Paper-1: General Studies	150	150	150 minutes
Part-A: Written (Objective Type)	Paper-2: Subject (compulsory paper)	300	150	150 minutes
Part-B	Interview	50	Not stated in the document	Not stated in the document
Total (DERIVED - our addition, not printed in the document)	Part-A and Part-B together	500	300	300 minutes of writing

Which official document this syllabus comes from ↑

Every topic on this page is taken from one file: the scheme and syllabus published by the Andhra Pradesh Public Service Commission at psc.ap.gov.in › 27.pdf . It carries the reference C.No: 289/SS/2008, is signed by the Secretary and is dated 01/07/2008. The Commission links it from its own syllabus index at portal-psc.ap.gov.in › GroupsSyllabus.aspx , on the row labelled Asst Tribal Welfare Officer; the sheet's own heading names Social Welfare Officers alongside that post.

A second official file supports the same reading. Annexure-II to APPSC Notification No. 12/2004, at psc.ap.gov.in › 2.pdf , lists Post Code No. 2 as Assistant Social Welfare Officers and gives the identical mark structure of 150, 300 and 50. It differs in one way we will not paper over: in the 2004 annexure Paper-2 was an optional subject chosen from a list of 28, while in the 2008 sheet Paper-2 is a single compulsory paper with the six sections set out below. The 2008 sheet is the newer document and the one the Commission currently links, so this page follows it.

What this page will not tell you is that a recruitment is open. On the day it was written, 2 September 2026, the Commission's own recruitment notifications listing at portal-psc.ap.gov.in › RecruitmentNotifications.aspx carried no Assistant Social Welfare Officer notification at all. The nearest live recruitment governed by this same scheme sheet is Assistant Tribal Welfare Officer, Notification No.05/2024 dated 09.02.2024. Prepare from this syllabus by all means, but check that notifications page yourself before you plan around a vacancy.

Paper-1: General Studies and Mental Ability, all six topics ↑

Paper-1 is 150 questions for 150 marks in 150 minutes, and the document heads its syllabus General Studies and Mental Ability. Six topics are listed. No marks split between them is given, so treat them as equally weighted until a real question paper tells you otherwise.

Five of the six are content topics and the sixth is reasoning, which is the only one that improves by practice alone. Two of the five - history and geography - are the ones explicitly given an Andhra Pradesh focus, and those two, together with polity and economy, come back at far greater depth in Paper-2. Preparing them once for both papers is the efficient way to read this syllabus.

No.	The topic as the syllabus names it	What to actually study
1	General Science; contemporary developments in Science and Technology and their implications	The document fixes the level itself: what a well-educated person who has made no special study of any scientific discipline would know from everyday observation and experience. So read for the implications of a development, not the derivation.
2	Current events of national and international importance	Current affairs at both levels, with no window stated. Treat the twelve months before the exam as the working range and keep a one-page monthly note.
3	History of India, in its social, economic, cultural and political aspects, with a focus on the Indian National Movement in Andhra Pradesh	The syllabus asks for broad general understanding, not dates for their own sake. The named focus is the Indian National Movement with Andhra Pradesh in view, which is also where Paper-2 Section-II goes deeper.
4	World Geography and Geography of India, with a focus on Andhra Pradesh	Two scales in one topic. The Andhra Pradesh layer is the one that repeats in Paper-2, where rainfall, irrigation and regional disparity come back as economics.
5	Indian Polity and Economy, including the country's political system, rural development, and Planning and economic reforms in India	Polity and economy are one topic here, not two. Rural development and the reform era are named explicitly, and both are examined again at length in Paper-2 Sections III and IV.
6	Mental ability: reasoning and inferences	The only non-content topic in Paper-1, and the only one that improves purely by timed practice. The document names reasoning and inference and does not list sub-types.

Paper-2: one compulsory subject paper in six sections ↑

Paper-2 is where the post is decided: 300 marks against Paper-1's 150. The document calls it Subject (compulsory paper). There is no optional subject to choose and no variation by discipline - it is the same paper for every candidate, which is the single biggest difference from the older 2004 scheme.

The syllabus divides it into six sections and gives each section five numbered topic entries. That makes 30 entries in Paper-2 and 36 across both papers. Those two totals are DERIVED: we counted the numbered entries in the document, which does not state either figure. The document also never says how the 300 marks are split between the six sections, so no honest table can give you a section-wise weighting, and any table that does is guessing.

The shape of the six sections is worth seeing before the topics themselves. Two sections are history, one national and one about Andhra Pradesh. One is the Constitution. Three are economics, and two of those three are entirely about the state. Counting entries, 15 of the 30 - Sections II, V and VI - are specifically about Andhra Pradesh, which is a fair description of what this paper is really testing.

Section	What it covers	Topic entries in the document
Section-I	History and Cultural Heritage of India, with emphasis on 20th century Indian history	5
Section-II	Social and Cultural History of Andhra Pradesh	5
Section-III	General Overview of the Indian Constitution	5
Section-IV	Planning in India and the Indian Economy	5
Section-V	Land Reforms and Social Changes in Andhra Pradesh after Independence	5
Section-VI	Andhra Pradesh's economy, its present status, strengths and weaknesses	5
All six sections	Compulsory subject paper, common to every candidate	30 (DERIVED - our count of the numbered entries)

At a glance

Conducting Body	Andhra Pradesh Public Service Commission (APPSC)
Post Name	Assistant Social Welfare Officer (ASWO)
Department	Social Welfare Department, Government of Andhra Pradesh
Total Vacancies	11
Official Website	www.psc.ap.gov.in
State	Andhra Pradesh

Section-I: History and Cultural Heritage of India, with emphasis on 20th century Indian history - all five topics ↑

Section-I is national history, and the document's own heading puts the emphasis on the twentieth century. Five entries carry it from the Indus cities to the years after independence, so the span is enormous and the depth per entry is correspondingly shallow. A candidate who knows the school-level arc of Indian history and can place the named movements is answering at the level being asked.

Where to put the extra hours: entry 4. It is the anti-caste, Dalit, non-Brahmin and self-respect movements, and for a Social Welfare Officer's paper it is both the likeliest source of questions and the closest thing in this section to the work of the post.

No.	The topic as the syllabus names it	What to actually study
1	Indus Civilization; Vedic Civilization; distinction between the two; evolution of Varna and Jathi/caste system; religious condition; emergence of religious movements (Jainism, Buddhism and other sects); rise of Magadha imperialism; rise of Mahayana; development of art (Gandhara, Mathura and other schools)	Ancient India compressed into one entry, and the comparison is asked for directly: what separates the Indus cities from the Vedic settlements. The caste question is set as an evolution, not a definition, which matters for a Welfare Officer's paper.
2	Advent of Islam and its impact; influence of Islam on Indian culture; religious movements; nature and significance of the Bhakti movements; growth of vernacular languages, literature, fine arts, architecture and monuments; Indo-Persian art and architecture; Vijayanagara empire, its contribution to art, literature and culture, socio-economic conditions, administration and fall; the Great Moghals and their contribution to Indian fine art and architecture; rise of Shivaji	Medieval India, weighted towards culture rather than campaigns. Vijayanagara is the one empire the entry asks about from four sides at once, and its fall is named separately.
3	Stages of colonialism; changes in administrative structure and politics; factors leading to British supremacy; assistance of Indian powers and the causes of their failure; civil rebellions; the Revolt of 1857 and its impact; rise of nationalist consciousness; factors in the growth of Indian nationalism and the Freedom Struggle in three phases (1885-1905, 1905-1920, 1920-47); significance of the Gandhian Era	The three phases are given as fixed periods, so learn the freedom struggle in those blocks rather than as one continuous story. The entry also asks why Indian powers lost, not only that they did.
4	Rise and growth of socio-religious and cultural movements, anti-caste, Dalit and non-Brahmin, and Justice/self-respect movements in modern India; social reform organisations and the role of intellectuals - Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Dayanand Saraswathi, Jyotiba Phule, Narayana Guru, Mahathma Gandhi, Ambedkar and others	The heaviest entry in Section-I for this particular post, and the one closest to the job itself. Six reformers are named; the list is open-ended, so the named six are the floor and not the ceiling.
5	Nationalist literature; growth of peasant and labour movements; role of leftist parties in anti-feudal and anti-colonial struggles; rise and growth of women's movements; origin and growth of communalism; workers and peasant movements; freedom and partition of India; important historical events after independence	This is where twentieth-century India is actually examined, and the only entry that carries the syllabus past independence into the events that followed it.

Section-II: Social and Cultural History of Andhra Pradesh - all five topics ↑

Section-II is the same history told from Andhra Pradesh. Five entries run from the Satavahanas to the formation of the state, and unlike Section-I they are dated: entry 2 fixes a window of 1000 AD to 1565 AD, and entry 5 closes at the state's formation. Because the sheet was published in 2008, nothing after that formation is in this syllabus.

This section rewards names. Across entries 3 and 4 the document lists poets, reformers and organisations by name; keep one sheet of those names with a line each, because that is the shape the questions take.

No.	The topic as the syllabus names it	What to actually study
1	The Satavahanas and their contribution; social structure; religious conditions; growth of literature and painting; the Ikshvakus and their cultural contribution; growth of Buddhism in Andhra Pradesh; the Eastern Chalukyas of Vengi, their importance and socio-cultural contribution; growth of Telugu language and literature; education and learning; religious sects; growth of art and architecture	Three dynasties in one entry - Satavahana, Ikshvaku, Eastern Chalukya - and each is asked about culturally rather than militarily. Telugu language and literature enters the syllabus here and stays for the next entry too.
2	Socio-cultural and religious conditions in Andhra Desha between 1000 AD and 1565 AD; growth of Telugu language and literature - Nannaya, Molla and others; fine arts and architecture; monuments and their significance; contribution of the Qutubshahis to Telugu language, literature, art, architecture and monuments	A dated window, 1000 AD to 1565 AD, so anything outside it belongs to the entries on either side. Two poets are named and the Qutubshahi contribution is asked about specifically as a contribution to Telugu, not to Persian.
3	Modern Andhra - socio-cultural awakening in Andhra; Brahma Samaj, Arya Samaj, the Theosophical Society; Adi-Andhra movements and the role of Veereshalingam and others; non-Brahmin, Adi-Andhra/Dalit and Justice/self-respect movements; Gurram Joshuva, Boyi Bheemanna, Sri Sri and others; growth of the nationalist movement in Andhra and the Andhra leaders during the Freedom Struggle; role of socialists and communists; anti-zamindari and kisan movements	The Andhra mirror of Section-I entry 4, and the densest entry in the whole of Paper-2 by number of named people and organisations. Four names are given; each is a person a Welfare Officer is expected to know.
4	The Asafjahi dynasty; socio-cultural awakening in Telangana; the Adi-Hindu Movement; Nizam Rashtra Janasangham; Andhra Mahasabha; Andhra Saaraswata Parishat; the role of the Hyderabad State Congress and the Vandemataram Movement	The Hyderabad state track, which runs separately from the Andhra track above. Four organisations and two movements are named, and each of them has its own founding purpose worth a line in your notes.
5	The Telangana People's Armed Struggle; Ittehadul-Muslimeen; the Razakars; anti-Nizam struggles; end of the Nizam's rule and the integration of Hyderabad State into the Indian Union; formation of Andhra Pradesh	The entry that closes Section-II, ending at the formation of the state. Because this scheme was published in 2008, the syllabus stops at that formation and says nothing about anything after it.

Section-III: General Overview of the Indian Constitution - all five topics ↑

Section-III is a general overview of the Constitution, and overview is the document's own word, which sets the depth expected. Five entries move from the nature of the Constitution to the welfare machinery built under it.

Entry 5 is the one to know cold. It names the Prevention of SC and ST Atrocities Act and four commissions, and it is the part of this whole syllabus that describes the statutory ground a Welfare Officer actually stands on.

No.	The topic as the syllabus names it	What to actually study
1	Nature of the Constitution; constitutional developments; salient features; the Preamble; Fundamental Rights; Directive Principles of State Policy and their relationship; Fundamental Duties; distinctive features of the Indian federation	The entry asks for the relationship between Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principles, not for two separate lists. That relationship is the examinable part.
2	Distribution of legislative powers between the Union and the State; administrative and financial relations between the Union and the States; powers and functions of constitutional bodies	Centre-state relations across all three heads, plus the constitutional bodies. The document does not list which bodies, so cover the full set the Constitution creates rather than a coaching shortlist.
3	Unicameral and bicameral legislatures; functions and crises of accountability; decline of the legislature; delegated legislation; legislative and judicial control over delegated legislation; judicial review of administrative action	The most theory-heavy entry in Section-III. Delegated legislation appears three times over - the thing itself, the two controls on it, and judicial review - so it is clearly the weight of this entry.
4	Amendment of the Constitution; the Basic Structure theory; emergency provisions and decentralisation; the community development experiment; the 3 tier model of Panchayat Raj; the 73rd and 74th amendments and their implementation	Two amendments are named by number, and the entry asks about their implementation and not only their text. For a field post in a welfare department, that implementation question is the practical one.
5	Welfare mechanism in India: provisions for Scheduled Castes, Tribes and Minorities; reservations for SC, ST and Backward Classes; the Prevention of SC and ST Atrocities Act; the National and State SC and ST Commission; the Women's Commission; the National and State Minorities Commission; the Human Rights Commission	This is the entry the post is built around. One Act and four commissions are named, two of them with a national and a state level where the document says so - and this is the single most predictable source of questions in the whole paper for a Welfare Officer.

Section-IV: Planning in India and the Indian Economy - all five topics ↑

Section-IV is the national economy: income and human development, planning, poverty and unemployment, money and banking, and public finance. Five entries, and between them they cover the standard economics of a state service paper.

Two of the five are deliberately undated - the recent 5 year plan, and reforms since the 1990s. Read those as the position in your own exam year rather than the position in 2008; the sheet is a statement of scope, not a snapshot of a year.

No.	The topic as the syllabus names it	What to actually study
1	National and per capita income and human development; sectoral changes in the Indian economy (GDP and work force)	Two measures that move differently: the share of GDP a sector produces and the share of the workforce it employs. The entry names both, so the gap between them is what to look at.
2	Indian Planning - objectives, priorities and the specific aims of the recent 5 year plan, its experience and problems; changes in the role of the public and private sectors and their shares in the total plan outlay before and after economic reforms	Note the wording: the recent five year plan, not a numbered one. The document was published in 2008, so read this as the current plan of whichever year you sit the exam, and pair it with the before-and-after-reform comparison the entry asks for.
3	Poverty and unemployment problems - their magnitude and the measures initiated to ameliorate them	Magnitude and remedy together. For this post the remedy half is the working half: the schemes, who they cover and how they are delivered.
4	Monetary policy; structure of Indian banking and non-banking financial institutions and the reforms in them since the 1990s; regulation of credit by RBI	Banking plus the non-banking side, which candidates usually skip. The reform window is stated as since the 1990s, so that is the period to be able to narrate.
5	Pattern of revenue, expenditure and public debt, and their effects on the economy	Public finance at the national level. The same three heads come back in Section-V for Andhra Pradesh, so learn the vocabulary once and reuse it there.

Section-V: Land Reforms and Social Changes in Andhra Pradesh after Independence - all five topics ↑

Section-V turns the same economics onto Andhra Pradesh and opens with land reform. Land, poverty, demography, state finance and the state's plans: five entries that together describe how the state raises money and where it spends it.

For this post entries 1 and 3 do the most work - the land reform laws, and social backwardness read through literacy, occupation and income. Both are the subject matter of the department the post sits in.

No.	The topic as the syllabus names it	What to actually study
1	Historical background of land reforms and the change in laws from time to time; abolition of intermediaries; tenancy reforms; ceilings on holdings; land issues in Andhra Pradesh	Land reform as a sequence of laws rather than a single event. The four named strands - intermediaries, tenancy, ceilings, land issues - are the order in which they happened and the order to learn them in.
2	Structure of the Andhra Pradesh economy, its sectoral and regional distribution and the extent of poverty; agricultural inputs and technology	The state economy described the way the national one was in Section-IV, with a regional layer added. Poverty is asked for by extent, which means figures and their source, not adjectives.
3	Demographic features and social backwardness; literacy and occupation structure; changes in the sectoral distribution of income and employment; socio-political and economic empowerment of women	Social backwardness and women's empowerment sit inside an economics section here, which tells you how this paper wants them answered: with data on literacy, occupation and income, not with sentiment.
4	State finances and budgetary policy - tax structure, sharing of central taxes, expenditure pattern in revenue and capital account as well as plan and non-plan accounts; public debt, its composition, and internal and external debt including World Bank loans	The most technical entry in Section-V. Four pairs of terms have to be kept straight: revenue against capital, plan against non-plan, internal against external debt, and the state's own taxes against its share of central taxes.
5	Five year plans of Andhra Pradesh - outlays, financing of the public sector plan, and the resource allocation pattern in the recent 5 year plan	The state counterpart of the planning entry in Section-IV, and it carries the same undated phrase: the recent five year plan. Read it as the plan current in your exam year.

Section-VI: Andhra Pradesh's economy, its present status, strengths and weaknesses - all five topics ↑

Section-VI asks about the present state of the Andhra Pradesh economy and, in the document's own framing, its strengths and weaknesses. Industry, agriculture and prices, regional disparity, rural credit, and services: one entry each.

Every entry here asks for a comparison or a problem alongside the growth figure - sectors against each other, regions against each other, credit adequacy against credit growth. An answer that only recites growth misses the half that is being marked.

No.	The topic as the syllabus names it	What to actually study
1	Growth and structure of industries in Andhra Pradesh; factories, small and tiny sectors, their comparison, growth, weaknesses and problems	The entry asks for a comparison between factory, small and tiny sectors, and for weaknesses as well as growth. A one-sided answer about growth misses half of what is asked.
2	Structure of agricultural outputs; administered prices including support and procurement prices; the Public Distribution System in Andhra Pradesh	Support price and procurement price are named separately because they are not the same thing. The Public Distribution System is the delivery end of the same chain, and it is directly relevant to the job.
3	Regional disparities in income, industrial output, rainfall, irrigation, health and education in Andhra Pradesh	Six named measures of regional disparity in a single entry: two economic, two physical and two social. Prepare it as a comparison between regions, not as six separate lists.
4	Institutional and non-institutional sources of rural credit in Andhra Pradesh, their structure and growth; cooperatives and their share in total credit; adequacy and problems	Rural credit split into the formal and the informal source, with the cooperative share asked about by name. This is the entry that connects Section-VI back to the welfare work the post exists for.
5	Service sector of Andhra Pradesh - its importance, composition and growth, with special reference to transport and communication, tourism and information technology	Three services are singled out - transport and communication, tourism, and information technology - so those three carry the weight even though the entry opens on the sector as a whole.

What this document does not state - and where to find it ↑

A scheme and syllabus sheet defines scope. It does not answer every question a candidate has, and the honest thing is to name the gaps rather than fill them with a confident guess. Each of the following is genuinely absent from the document this page is built on.

For every one of them, the only source worth trusting is the Commission's notification for the recruitment you are actually applying to, published at portal-psc.ap.gov.in › RecruitmentNotifications.aspx . A syllabus sheet is permanent; a notification is what makes it live.

Negative marking. The sheet says nothing about a penalty for a wrong answer, in either paper. Any negative-marking figure you see quoted for this post is somebody's assumption unless it appears in a live notification.
Qualifying marks, minimum marks in a paper, and cut-offs. None of the three is printed anywhere in the document.
How the 300 marks of Paper-2 are divided among its six sections, and how many questions come from each topic entry. Only the paper totals are given.
The language the question paper is set in. The sheet does not say whether it is English, Telugu, or both.
The number of vacancies, the pay scale, age limits, educational qualification, application fee, and every date. This is a syllabus sheet; none of that is in it, and all of it belongs to a recruitment notification.
Any syllabus, format or duration for the interview. Part-B is given 50 marks and nothing further.
A book list. The Commission publishes a topic list, not a reading list - a syllabus is not a bibliography.

Important Links

Open official website

FAQ — Your Questions, Answered

Which body conducts this exam?

Andhra Pradesh Public Service Commission (APPSC)

Which post is this for?

Assistant Social Welfare Officer (ASWO)

Which department is this recruitment for?

Social Welfare Department, Government of Andhra Pradesh

How many vacancies are there?

Official source: Official PDF ↗. Always confirm on the official website before acting on it.