OdishaPlus Bureau
Odisha won the World Habitat Award, global recognition for its ambitious initiative Jaga Mission. This award is given by World Habitat, a UK-based organization, in partnership with UN-Habitat, every year, in recognition of innovative, outstanding, and revolutionary ideas, projects, and programs from across the world.
Jaga Mission is acclaimed as the World’s largest slum land titling project, benefiting a million urban poor living in the slums, with promises to provide “self-respect and freedom from the perpetual fear of eviction”.
This Mission is being executed in collaboration with reputed philanthropic organizations, like Tata Trusts and Norman Foster Foundation was launched in May 2018 for providing land tenure to slum dwellers and transforming all slums in the state to liveable habitat.
As of now, the project has provided the land right certificates to over 52,682 families, as many as 1,725 slums surveyed using drones and GIS technology, adoption of state-of-art technology combined with extensive community participation resulted in dispute and litigation free implementation in a time-bound manner, the transformation of 255 slums into liveable habitat under implementation and community centric and community-led, right-based slum up-gradation program.
Heartening to see our mission to empower millions of slum dwellers through #JagaMission recognized by the world. Glad that it has set global benchmarks to empower urban poor with land rights & better facilities. Dedicate the award to people of #Odisha#OdishaWinsWorldHabitatAward pic.twitter.com/Sm6JaLKmCr
— Naveen Patnaik (@Naveen_Odisha) December 9, 2019
Expressing his happiness Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik tweeted, “#Odisha won the World Habitat Award 2019 for @TheJagaMission. Congratulations to Team @HUDDeptOdisha& its partners @tatatrusts and @NormanFosterFdn. The journey to empower 1.7 million urban poor living in slums continues.” Chairman, Tata Trusts Ratan N. Tata said, “I extend my congratulations to the Chief Minister of Odisha and his team at this proud moment. The World Habitat Award is a recognition for the vision and commitment of the Government of Odisha to improve the lives of the urban poor. The Tata Trusts are privileged to partner with the Government of Odisha in this noble initiative.”
David Ireland, Chief Executive of World Habitat, said: “This project has recognized that you can’t solve this issue by demolishing homes and forcing people to move. This project has not only established land rights for residents and improved living conditions, but they are doing it at an astonishing scale.”
The World Habitat Awards judges’ panel said, “There is huge ambition behind this state-led project, which takes a community-centered approach to grant land rights. This is a fantastic initiative, acting as a superb example to the rest of the country of what can be done. The extreme speed of their progress, backed up by legislation, is very impressive.”
Notably, this project was also awarded the India Geospatial Excellence Award for technological innovation in transforming the lives of the urban poor. It is for the first time in the world that such type of spatial data is being prepared, for extensive use through drones, for slums.
This hybrid program of the state government with the involvement of innovative technology and extensive community participation is highly appreciated by the policymakers, administrators, and researchers.