Dr Namesh Killemsetty, a dynamic young guy from Brahmapur has recently been awarded with the “Alma H Young Emerging Scholar Award” by the Urban Affairs Association, an international professional organisation for urban scholars, researchers, and public service providers based in USA, for his research on slums in Ganjam district.
He completed his PhD in Public Policy from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Killemsetty’s dissertation titled, ‘Assessment of Housing in Slums: Learning from Slum Communities in Small Cities,’ explored the housing issues faced by slum dwellers in Ganjam district. His research studied the significance and impact of the currently implemented in Odisha Land Rights to Slum Dwellers Act and Jaga Mission to the slum. Notably, the project was conducted in collaboration with the Youth for Social Development (YSD) and is one of the first large scale research projects focusing on the evaluation of the Jaga Mission, which is the core slum development project of the Government of Odisha. Provision of Pattasto slum dwellers in the State through the Jaga Mission has been considered as the world’s largest land titling programme.
Dr Killemsetty spent months interacting with slum communities in Dhimira Bauri Sahi and Raghupati Nagar Slum in Brahmapur, Meta Sahi in Chatrapur, and Sai Baba Sahi in Gopalpur, It was observed that, while communities in Chatrapur and Gopalpur have been content with the provision of land titles and wished for greater support in infrastructure development, slum communities in Brahmapur city, on the other hand, greatly wished for provision of land titles as their counterparts in small cities.
The research identified multiple avenues of development from increase in financial support for construction of housing to improvement in education and healthcare facilities for slum dwellers.