The Odisha Government has directed the concerned officials to conduct a State-wide enumeration of homestead landless families of vulnerable sections of the society by August and allot them homestead land by October.
As per the recently-published Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) report of the Government of India, Odisha has a sizeable population of rural households with a meagre monthly income of less than Rs5,000. And 54 per cent (46, 61, 262) of the households are without land while 36.19 per cent of the population is landless deriving a major part of their income from manual casual labour compared to the national average of 29.97 per cent.
The State Government is set to launch the third such enumeration exercise in the last decade.During 2003-04, the Revenue Department had identified 2.49 lakh homestead landless families following which the Vasundhara scheme was announced in 2005-06. Subsequently, enumeration was done in 2011 too. As many as 5, 42, 830 homestead landless families have received titles between 2003 and 2015, the annual activity report of the Revenue Department said.
last year, the State Government announced the Odisha State Policy for Girls and Women for the identification of vulnerable women, especially single women, and prioritising them under housing and land ownership programmes.
Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik had launched the Comprehensive Programme on land Rights to Tribals in 2013 to cover 18, 000 villages in the 118 Tribal Sub-Plan blocks. The programme engaged village youths who worked in tandem with the revenue officials in identifying landless families in villages and 17,501 pattas were distributed.Recently, the Government has raised the annual income level from Rs24,000 to Rs40,000 for eligibility to be covered under its land allocation programme.