National Workshop on "Learnings from Odisha’s Efforts of Building Resilient Cities"

About the Webinar

The challenges associated with the rising slum population are not new. The increased vulnerability of India’s urban poor since the onset of COVID-19 has once again brought to our attention the insecurity of tenure, fragile living conditions, livelihood, and socio-economic status of the urban poor. The state of Odisha embarked on a journey in addressing these challenges with the implementation of the JAGA Mission by providing land rights to the slum dwellers in its first phase. Building on the same, Odisha formulated programmes for providing access to basic infrastructure, strengthening communities, and providing gainful employment opportunities. Odisha is the first state in India to develop the Urban Wage Employment Initiative (UWEI) - MUKTA to tackle the livelihood crisis of the urban poor in the face of the ongoing pandemic. Around 450,000 urban poor slum dwellers were engaged in the creation of urban infrastructure for slum upgradation in convergence with the JAGA Mission. It not only protected their incomes amidst the ongoing pandemic but also created community assets, strengthened community institutions, enhanced ecological resilience, and applied innovative technologies to enhance the sustainability of welfare schemes and measures.

The H&UDD-BHC-CPR partnership for “Building State Capacities for land, planning and slum upgrading for resilient cities in Odisha” has been working closely with the H&UDD, Government of Odisha to roll out the above-mentioned interventions. Under the partnership, three knowledge products on 1) New Habitat 2) Urban Wage Employment Initiative, and 3) Online Tool for City-Level Slum Free Planning, have been developed for documenting the learnings from these endeavors.

In order to disseminate learnings from Odisha’s efforts and deliberate on the interventions taken by the national and other state governments necessary for building resilient cities as we build forward from the ongoing pandemic, a National level dissemination workshop on "Learnings from Odisha’s Efforts of Building Resilient Cities" is being jointly organised by British High Commission, India and SCI-FI CPR in partnership with H&UDD, GoO.