Tenure security and property rights: the case of land titling for ‘slum’ dwellers in Odisha, India

ABSTRACT

India continues to urbanise rapidly tinged with sub-standard living conditions of a growing ‘slum’ population. Improving the living conditions of slum-dwellers remains a gargantuan and intractable challenge requiring solutions at scale grounded on households’ real experience of the process. The State of Odisha, in Eastern India, is currently implementing a state-wide land-titling initiative to improve the tenure security of a million slum-dwellers through legal, institutional, and technical innovations based on the Odisha Land Rights to Slum-dwellersAct 2017 (OLRSD). Given the known negative consequences of titling that grants ‘full property rights’, such as the speculative sale of the titles, the facilitation of elite capture,and disruption of community life and social networks, the OLRSD has fashioned the title as a ‘limited instrument’ that still assures the possibility to inherit and aims at facilitating mortgage for housing-backed lending. The paper discusses early learnings from Odisha’s ‘intermediate’ aspects of its titling policy in nine settlements researched across three districts. As per people’s accounts of their experienced reality, the titling, complemented by slum upgrading, has already facilitated improvements in the housing conditions of households subject to extreme poverty. However, concomitant challenges are surfacing for instance, although the OLRSD formally permits the titles to be used as collateral for housing loans, the non-acceptance of the title by mainstream banks forces the recipients to borrow from spurious private lenders, thus increasing their vulnerability. Understanding such and related challenges is relevant for better addressing the dimension of de jure land tenure security in slums at scale across India.

KEYWORDS:

• Tenure security
• property rights
• intermediate land titling
• solutions for informal settlements at scale
• odisha
• India

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Slum’ terminology has been long discredited and critiqued as pejorative, imprecise and over-simplistic (Gilbert 2007; Simon 2011). Instead, the preferred usage is ‘informal settlement’. In India, nevertheless, the ‘slum label’ has been co-opted by residents to gain access to basic services and other state resources (Burra 2005). While recognising these controversies, this paper will retain the term ‘slum’ to align with the Indian legal framework.

2. Tata Trusts is a philanthropic organisation founded by the TATA family (www.tatatrusts.org) and is coordinating the JAGA mission along with the Government of Odisha (GoO).

3. (Landesa, International Forestry Resources and Institutions, NRMC Centre for Land Governance and Regional Centre for Development Cooperation)

4. Based on the Orissa Survey and Settlement Act, 1958

5. Patta/Record of Rights (RoR) is the legal document issued by the Revenue Department, which establishes land ownership and specifies the location and dimensions of the land parcel and classification and whether the tenure is freehold or restricted. However, the process of obtaining an RoR is complex and obtaining an RoR can take anywhere from 3 months to 2 years depending on the availability of various papers and the complexity of the matter with the cost component varying between INR 150 (USD 2.5) to INR 8,000 (USD 125) (Das & Mukherjee, 2018: v &13).

6. OLRSD, 2017 defines a ‘slum’ as a compact settlement of at least twenty households with a collection of poorly built tenements, mostly of temporary nature, crowded together usually with inadequate sanitary and drinking water facilities in unhygienic conditions which maybe on the State Government land in an urban area (GoO 2017b:5)

7. Equivalent to USD 2473 (as on 15 February 2021)

8. Slum upgrading, in a narrow sense refers to ‘improvements in housing and/or basic infrastructure whilst in a broader sense, includes enhancements in the economic and social processes that can bring about such physical improvements (UN-Habitat, 2004:3; UN-Habitat 2014, p. 16).

9. (http://www.jagamission.org/) accessed on 25 September 2020. The institutional framework and process flow of the JAGA mission can be found at http://www.jagamission.org/pdf/Compendium%20Land%20Rights.pdf

10. Not to be confused with SPARC -The Society for The Promotion of Area Resource Centers. See SPARC Bhubaneswar use of drone technology for slum titling in:

http://sparcindia.com/blogs/how-drone-mapping-paved-way-to-the-worlds-largest-slum-land-titling-project/ accessed on 22 June 2020

11. Kutcha houses are non-durable houses made of plastic sheets, mud etc. while pucca houses are durable houses where the walls (and roof) are made up of bricks, concrete, stones and mortar, slate and metal sheets.

12. PMAY, 2015, the current GoI’s ‘Housing for All’ programme, has many components one of which provides subsidised housing to the EWS families to either construct new or upgrade existing houses, if they possess land ownership documentation (MHUPA, 2016:§7.1). For LRC beneficiaries, INR 150,000 (equivalent to USD 2,310) was provided through PMAY subsidy and INR 50,000 (equal to USD 770) by GoO’s AWAAS programme. The SBM is led by the Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs (MoHUA) and aims to ensure universal sanitation coverage.

13. Tenable settlements are decided by the GoO and include sites, where existence of human habitation does not entail undue risk to the safety or health or life of the residents on such sites and where the settlement is not considered contrary to public interest or the land is not required for any public or development purpose (LGAF 2014). In general, ‘hazardous’ slums are defined in terms of environmental and health risks and ‘objectionable’ slums violate legal or master-plan norms, however the ‘challenge with tenability categorisations, is their arbitrary usage’ (Kundu 2011, pp. 2–3). Another incontrovertible challenge is slums on Central government land, which due to colonial legacy, is one of the biggest urban landowners. Yet, it does not allow tenure and services to be provided on its land (Burra 2005, p. 69). States that are willing to provide services to residents need a ‘no objection certificate’ (Subbaraman et al., 2012 in Nolan et al. 2018, p. 9) and thus, usually slums on Central Government lands are deemed untenable.

14. Katcha: Walls and roofs made of unburnt bricks, bamboo, mud, grass, leaves, reeds, thatch, etc. (Jain et al. 2016).

15. Ration cards are official documents given out by the Ministry of Food and Supply that entitle people living below the poverty line to buy a fixed quantity of subsidised food from local governmental fair-trade shops.

16. Sale of patta or slum land after regularisation is common in India. ‘It is widely believed in policy circles that allottees sell their houses to make a profit and then find another piece of vacant public land to squat upon’ (Datta 2006, p. 272). One instance of a titling programme within India that had conditional tenure is the case of the Rohini project in Delhi. This included plots for all income groups with conditions for the low income group plots that prevented their sale within five years. However, most plot owners sold out to estate agents using power of attorney, completely bypassing the restriction (Payne, interview transcript 2022)

17. There were many rumours about relocation. Relocation attempts were thus being undertaken at a slower pace, to ensure that relocatees did not return due to lack of basic services and livelihood opportunities in the relocation sites and relocation was thus not unsuccessful.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shobha Rao P.

Shobha Rao P. Independent Consultant. The research is based on the Master’s thesis produced by the lead author for the Centre for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), Cambridge University. Email: [email protected]

Jaime Royo-Olid

Jaime Royo-Olid, (PhD Candidate at the Centre of Development Studies, Cambridge University and Programme Officer at the European Commission)

Jan Turkstra

Dr. Jan Turkstra (UN Habitat)