World’s Largest SlumTitling Initiative Wins the UN-Habitat
Like many states in India, Odisha State has experienced a 27 percent growth in population in its cities due to rural-to-urban migration.
In search of better livelihood opportunities, most of these migrants settle in informal settlements. Local governments struggle to provide land for housing as well as basic infrastructure and services such as electricity, sanitation, water, and roads. Without having formal rights to the home and land they occupy, these informal residents are often barred from getting loans for home improvement, starting businesses, accessing basic services, enrolling their children in schools or finding a formal job. In an effort to document the growing informal settlements and transform the slums into liveable communities, the Indian philanthropic group, Tata Trusts, partnered with Cadasta Foundation to support the Odisha Liveable Habitat Mission “Jaga”—an innovative project designed to improve the living conditions of informal settlements.
Through the project, more than 700 community data collectors were trained, and with the use of Cadasta’s Esri-powered technology and services, were able to efficiently document and map 1,725 slum communities and 173,162 households (to date) to create an official data set of slum dwellings in Odisha.
Once documented, the state government issued nearly 58,000 Land Rights Certificates and 105,000 Land Entitlement Certificates, benefiting an estimated 1 million people to date.
In 2019, the Jaga Mission was recognized by World Habitat and UN-Habitat as one of the world’s most ”‘innovative, outstanding and revolutionary ideas, projects, and programmes” and won the Bronze World Habitat Award. In addition to the award, Jaga Mission is already being publicized by the media as the “world’s largest slum titling initiative.” The mission has also inspired other Indian states to develop similar programs.
Using Land Data to Empower Communities
Not only has the data been used to issue formal land rights certificates, but the data has empowered the local communities, Slum Dwellers Associations, and the Odisha State Government to make critical urban development and planning decisions, bringing new community infrastructure—such as fish processing facilities—to the settlements and making the settlements more safe, resilient, and sustainable. Local authorities are utilizing the data collected on Cadasta’s tools to make decisions around the installation of essential civic urban infrastructure such as housing, road type and location, drainage, individual household toilets, public toilets, street lights, constant piped water supply up to the households, common work sheds, parks and playgrounds, among other amenities. Communities are also using the data to make their own decisions regarding the placement of public toilets, water piping to homes, LED street lighting, and emergency corridors.
Cadasta’s vision is to build a world where even the most marginalized individuals and communities can benefit from the opportunities afforded by secure land and resource rights.
Cadasta Foundation, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit, was created in 2015 by a group of land rights and development experts, technologists, and donors to positively disrupt the land sector, and with it, the development sector. Cadasta does this by catalyzing communities to collect data and map their own land and people; empowering the use of these data to advance land rights and secure tenure; and providing an innovative platform and services for communities, governments, the private sector, and others to drivesystems change from the bottom up.
