Odisha wins two prestigious national awards

New Delhi: Odisha bagged two National awards at the second edition of the Janaagraha City Governance Awards announced today at a virtual award ceremony presided over by Union Minister for Housing and Urban Affairs, Hardeep Singh Puri. The State won in two of the five award categories competing with 54 applicants spanning across 17 States.

The Housing and Urban Development (H&UDD) won the Best State Award for JAGA Mission for enactment of laws, drafting of policies, setting up of institutional mechanisms, programmes or schemes to successfully foster urban decentralisation in the cities and State.

The JAGA Mission was selected on basis of the historic Odisha Land Rights to Slum Dwellers Act, 2017 and for transforming urban slums into liveable habitats with intensive community mobilisation and empowering slum dwellers through Slum Development Associations (SDAs). The Mission provides slum dwellers with secure tenure and access to liveable habitat with infrastructure and services and covering 3,000 slums benefiting over 1.8 million population.

The Public Health Engineering Organisation (PHEO), H&UDD won the Best Civic Agency Award for universal access to piped water supply through demonstrable inter-agency coordination and decentralisation in practice.

G Mathi Vathanan Principal Secretary H&UD received the Awards. Among others DMA Sangramjit Naik, EIC PH Basanta Kumar Senapati, Deputy Secretary Sarada Panda and other departmental officers were present during the programme.

The winners have been chosen by an eminent jury comprising Priyank Kharge and Arvind Bellad (Members of Legislative Assembly, Karnataka), Amitabh Kant (NITI Aayog), Ashutosh Varshney (Brown University), Niranjan Rajadhyaksha (columnist and economist, IDFC Institute),Sanjeev Chopra, IAS (Director, LBSNAA), Yamini Aiyar (Centre for Policy Research) and S. K. Das, IAS (Retd).

The awards have been instituted in the memory of V. Ramachandran, a doyen of decentralisation, to recognize ground-breaking work in decentralisation in urban context by institutions across government.

Formerly known as V. Ramachandran Awards for Excellence in Urban Decentralisation, the awards celebrate initiatives and efforts based on five broad categories- Best State, Best Municipality, Best Civic Agency, Best State Election Commission and Best State Financial Commission.