Social Innovation as a Disruptor of Tenure: Recognising Land Rights of Slum Dwellers in Odisha, India

Ownership of much land globally is formally unrecorded. Advances in geospatial and drone technologies are enabling unmapped land to be recorded in ways which do not reflect traditional surveys, and introduce new ways of achieving cadastral data for the purposes of registration. Disruption is challenging established land law, and creating novel opportunities for individual land certification—rattling indefeasibility and tenure. The chapter looks to Odisha, India, as a case study, to raise systemic problems around urbanization and affordable housing, and how social innovation has been a lever for aligning slum owners with land ownership. We explore an understanding of the nature of social innovation, and how it has spurred legal innovation for land rights in Odisha. Given the global proliferation of urban informal settlements, understanding catalysts for disruption into land law/lore offers learnings for comparative jurisdictions as they address their own complex challenges in the formalization of settlements, thus contributing to global progress in achieving the Sustainable Development Goal of ‘leaving no one behind’.