India's slum dwellers are visible yet institutionally marginalized. Odisha's Mission Jaga (2017) attempted to change this by granting heritable Land Rights Certificates to slum dwellers and formalizing Slum Dwellers' Associations (SDAs) as the "Fourth Tier of Governance". It attempted embedding communities as implementing partners within the state's administrative architecture rather than treating them as passive beneficiaries. This paper asks to what extent the state can engineer its own decentralization before curtailing its own initiative. Drawing on sixteen qualitative interviews with stakeholders drawn from across seven cities, the study examines whether SDAs are characterized by real empowerment or tokenism, how they reshape municipal power relations, and whether their gains can outlast the political conditions that produced them. The findings reveal that SDAs experience varying degrees of empowerment depending on the specific domain. SDAs exercised delegated power in infrastructure creation, approached citizen control in political formation, but remained consultative and dependent on financial matters. Rather than dismantling patronage, Mission Jaga replaced slum-level intermediaries with bureaucratized state dependence. Municipal resistance was intense precisely because the SDAs were not tokenistic, but disrupted established patronage networks. This resistance was held in check only by the direct political mandate from the highest levels of power and authority. That dependence proved to be its undoing. When the ruling party lost power in 2024, the incoming government reduced the prominence of Mission Jaga, without abolishing it. The paper concludes that state-engineered empowerment can be real, but remains precarious if not anchored in autonomous institutions.