Odisha’s Jaga Mission Wins Bronze World Habitat Award For 2nd Time

Bhubaneswar: Odisha’s ambitious initiative Jaga Mission, a slum land titling project, benefiting a million urban poor living in the slums, has won the ‘World Habitat Award for the second time. It is the bronze award winner for 2023.

“We are delighted to receive the Bronze World Habitat Award for Jaga Mission for the second time. Jaga Mission has successfully demonstrated that there is an urgent need to have a paradigm shift in the government’s approach by recognising the informal settlements and the slum dwellers as an indispensable part of the city fabric and empowering them with land tenure security, and better living habitats. This global recognition helps in promoting this best practice for other governments dealing with similar challenges of rapid urbanisation and the consequent rise of informal settlements,” said Housing and Urban Development Principal Secretary Mathi Vathanan.

This award is given by World Habitat, in partnership with UN-Habitat, every year, in recognition of innovative, outstanding, and revolutionary ideas, and projects from across the world.

Chief Executive of World Habitat David Ireland said: “Jaga Mission is a hugely ambitious state-wide project that aims to make Odisha state slum-free by upgrading informal settlements, improving governance and securing land ownership for slum dwellers. There is nothing else like it.”

The Odisha government is leading the Jaga Mission programme to upgrade all of the state’s 2,919 slums – improving living conditions for 1.7 million people – with an aim to become the first slum-free state in India. And to date, 707 slums have been upgraded across 30 cities, of which eight have been declared slum-free.

The project takes a holistic approach to address poverty, focusing on three core issues:

>> Granting land rights to residents to mitigate the threat of forced evictions and enable access to public housing subsidies
>> Infrastructure upgrades to improve living conditions and livelihood opportunities
>> Community mobilisation to empower marginalised groups to construct, manage and maintain upgraded facilities

The project’s annual budget is approximately Rs 5 billion INR ($65 million USD), which comes predominantly from the Odisha state budget and grants from the central and State governments that are meant for various components required for slum upgrading, an official release said.

It is now being replicated in the northern state of Punjab, where it will benefit an additional 1.4 million people.

In 2019, the project received the World Habitat Awards for its success in providing land tenure security to slum dwellers.