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.