March 2014 – Odisha, a state on the eastern coast of India, has endeavored over the years to enact laws aimed at providing land to those cultivating it and redistributing ownership of land. Landesa designed and piloted a model where a local youth (called a Community Resource Person) – identified by the community – is trained to provide additional capacity to local government land administration officials to identify and provide title to the formerly landless families. This model was subsequently scaled to cover 1,042 villages in seven districts of the state. The state government has further extended the program to another 18,000 villages to touch 1.2 million families. This paper highlights how people-centric land governance examples have improved land administration, making it more efficient and effective. This will be the key learning for similar projects around the world since it discusses the favorable factors and key features to be considered for scaling up a people-centric land allocation program. This Paper was prepared for presentation at the “2014 World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty” in Washington DC, March 24-27. Authored by Sibabrata Choudhury & Susanta Nanda. | Download the paper
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