In August 2017, the Government of Odisha, India enacted the Land Rights to Slum Dwellers Act, granting eligible slum dwellers non-transferable but heritable and mortgageable land rights up to 30m2/45m2/60m2 in different urban areas. This required transparent and time-bound assessment of land occupancy for around 500,000 slum households across 3000 slums in 114 urban local bodies. SPARC, as the Technical Partner under Tata Trusts and Tata Steel Foundation, implemented an innovative Land Rights Grant Management System for the Jaga Mission, Housing & Urban Development Department to facilitate the world’s largest land records titling program.
- A Cloud deployed GIS tech-platform for input, analysis, visualisation, decision making & reporting.
- A mobile application for location based survey and enumeration of slum households
- UAV (drone) based survey of slum areas
- Generation of orthoimages through structure-from-motion photogrammetry
- GIS integration of images, land records a mapping of household occupied area
- Spatial analysis for tenability assessment of land rights
- Generation of land rights proposals with grant area, settlement option (in-situ/ relocation/ land use conversion)
- Land right decision support system for Urban Area Slum Settlement and Rehabilitation Committee
- Processing and tracking of land title grants, pendency with reason with an analytical dashboard
- Training and capacity building of government officials and NGOs involved in the process
The scale and effectiveness of this implementation have garnered recognition globally, with various forums applauding the transformative and transparent nature of the process. The path-breaking initiative of Government of Odisha has won The World Habitat Award (UN Habitat) and Asia-Pacific Housing forum.