What Development Actually Looks Like in Kalahandi

I grew up in Junagarh, in Kalahandi district of western Odisha. When people ask me about Kalahandi, they usually want one of two things: the development report version (poverty statistics, historical famines, government programs) or the resilience narrative (born in hardship, built despite the odds). I understand both framings, and I find both incomplete.

This essay is a different attempt. A ground-level accounting of what development in Kalahandi actually looks like in 2026 — what is genuinely improving, what remains stuck, and what the data cannot tell you that the experience can.

What the NITI Aayog ranking actually means

In 2018, the Government of India launched the Aspirational Districts Programme, a centrally driven initiative to accelerate development in 112 of the country's most underdeveloped districts. Kalahandi was included — a recognition of the structural gap between its potential and its outcomes.

In 2025, Kalahandi ranked first in Odisha under the ADP for Health and Nutrition, with a 35.48% improvement score. I want to be precise about what this means and what it doesn't.

What it means: institutional delivery rates have improved — more births happen in hospitals rather than homes without skilled attendants. Immunization coverage has expanded. Child nutrition monitoring has become more systematic. Maternal mortality has fallen. These are genuine improvements in the lives of real people, achieved through sustained effort by health workers, ASHA workers, and administrative officers working in difficult conditions.

What it doesn't mean: Kalahandi has solved its development challenge. The ADP ranking measures improvement from a baseline, not the absolute level. Ranking first in improvement says the starting point was low and the trajectory has turned. It does not say the destination has been reached. On most human development indicators — per capita income, educational attainment above primary level, private sector employment — Kalahandi continues to lag significantly behind coastal Odisha and far behind the national urban average.

The ranking is worth acknowledging. It should not be inflated into a story it isn't.

What the investment actually is

Three categories of investment are visibly active in Kalahandi in 2025 and 2026.

Renewable energy. The Indravati river system and the Eastern Ghats topography make Kalahandi favorable for pumped-storage hydropower — technology that stores energy by pumping water uphill during low-demand periods and releasing it through turbines during peak demand. Adani Hydro Energy, Greenko, and Jindal Green all have projects in various stages of development in the district. This is real investment, with real potential for government revenue and construction employment. It is not, however, the kind of investment that employs software engineers or business analysts or the people who graduate from central universities and go looking for careers.

Agro-processing. Coastal Biotech's Rs 350 crore investment in agro-processing and cold chain infrastructure targets Kalahandi's agricultural output — rice, pulses, turmeric, and bamboo products. This is the category of investment most likely to create direct livelihood improvement for farming households, because it raises the value captured locally from agricultural production. Cold chain infrastructure also reduces post-harvest losses that have historically eaten significantly into farmer income. This is meaningful, and it is earlier stage than the energy investment.

Infrastructure. Road connectivity to Bhawanipatna has improved materially since 2015. National Highway expansion is ongoing. Rail connectivity — historically one of the district's most significant disadvantages — has improved with the Junagarh Road station and expanded services. Power availability and reliability have improved. Digital connectivity has expanded.

These are the inputs that make a place workable. They are necessary. They are not sufficient.

The talent drain problem

When I set up a 10-seater office in Kalahandi, the infrastructure worked. The problem was people.

Not people from outside Kalahandi — the question of whether you can attract outside talent is secondary. The primary question is whether the talented people from Kalahandi itself choose to stay. The answer, consistently, is no — and the reason is not complicated.

A graduate from Kalahandi with an engineering degree can earn ₹4-5 lakh per year in Bhawanipatna if they can find work at all. The same person earns ₹8-12 lakh per year as a mid-level IT professional in Hyderabad, in an environment with better hospitals, better schools for their children, more social infrastructure, and visible career trajectories. The rational decision — for them, as individuals — is to leave.

I made a version of that decision myself, eventually, though I came back in different ways.

The talent drain is the hardest development problem Kalahandi faces, because it is the problem that compounds all the others. Local institutions stay weak because the people who would strengthen them leave. Local businesses stay small because the people who would build them leave. Local networks stay thin because the people who would extend them leave. This is not a criticism of the people who leave — it is a description of the incentive structure they face.

Infrastructure investment does not solve the talent drain unless it is accompanied by employers who need educated, skilled talent at wages competitive with urban alternatives. This is the gap. Hydropower projects employ construction workers, equipment technicians, and project managers — typically from outside the district. Agro-processing employs some knowledge workers, but primarily agricultural and processing labor. The kinds of employers that retain university graduates — technology companies, knowledge services, professional services — are largely absent from Kalahandi.

What Vedanta's presence actually teaches

The Vedanta alumina refinery at Lanjigarh, on the border of Kalahandi and Rayagada districts, has been operating since 2007. Its history is contested — the original expansion plan was blocked by the Supreme Court in 2013 following the famous Niyamgiri referendum, in which Dongria Kondh tribal communities voted against allowing mining in their sacred hills. The existing refinery has continued operating on imported bauxite.

What the Vedanta story teaches about Kalahandi's development is not what most accounts focus on. The employment generated by a large industrial plant — even a contested one — is primarily skilled technical, managerial, and professional employment that largely comes from outside. The local economic impact is real (contractor employment, local procurement, some tax revenue), but the link between industrial investment and local talent retention is weaker than it appears.

The Niyamgiri referendum is also worth understanding clearly: it was not a vote against development. It was a vote against a specific development that the affected communities judged would destroy more than it created for them. The Dongria Kondh communities of the Niyamgiri hills are not against economic opportunity. They are, like anyone, in favor of opportunity that reaches them rather than passing over them.

This distinction matters for anyone thinking seriously about Kalahandi's development. Investment that creates opportunity for people from Kalahandi is development. Investment that extracts from Kalahandi and employs people brought from elsewhere while generating revenue that flows primarily to state coffers and private investors is something else. Both happen in Kalahandi. Conflating them distorts the account.

What is actually improving

I want to be clear about the real gains, because they are real.

Physical access has improved dramatically since the 1980s, when Kalahandi's isolation was a significant multiplier of every other problem. The district is no longer as difficult to reach. This matters because isolation compounds disadvantage in every dimension — health outcomes, market access, information flow, administrative responsiveness.

Health outcomes have improved. The combination of better physical access to health facilities, more trained health workers, and specific programs targeting maternal and child health has reduced mortality at rates that would have seemed implausible in 1990.

Agricultural productivity has improved in the irrigated river valley areas, where the Indravati and its tributaries support two-crop cultivation. Areas dependent entirely on monsoon remain vulnerable, but the proportion of truly rain-dependent cultivation has fallen.

Educational access has improved at the primary and secondary level. The proportion of children completing school has risen significantly. The gap this creates — children who complete school and then face a local economy that cannot absorb them — is itself a development problem, but it is a better problem to have than children who don't complete school.

What actually needs to happen

Kalahandi's next development challenge is different from the one that consumed the last four decades. The last challenge was basic access: connectivity, health infrastructure, school enrollment. That challenge is not solved, but it has advanced substantially.

The next challenge is economic complexity: creating a local economy diverse enough to retain educated talent, create multiple ladders of upward mobility, and generate tax revenues that can compound into better local institutions.

This requires private sector investment in non-extractive, talent-intensive industries. That requires, in turn, two things that are genuinely difficult: an honest accounting of what Kalahandi's competitive advantages actually are (not what they should be), and patient investment in talent and institutions that may take a decade to produce returns.

The honest accounting of competitive advantages includes: agricultural productivity in the river valleys (a real, underexploited asset), renewable energy potential (genuinely large, genuinely underutilized), proximity to the Odisha coast via improving connectivity, and a population that is, if you know it, significantly more capable than its development indicators suggest.

The patient investment includes building institutions — not importing them. Setting up a branch office of a Bhubaneswar-based organization in Bhawanipatna generates some local employment. Building an institution that trains people in Kalahandi, connects them to opportunities inside and outside the district, and builds local leadership capacity does something more durable.

What I know that the data can't say

I grew up in Junagarh. I took 184 job rejections before getting my first opportunity. I built two companies from a starting point that most development models would have predicted poorly for.

What I know from that experience is that capability is present in Kalahandi in ways that the statistics don't capture — because the statistics measure outcomes, and the people of Kalahandi have been systematically denied the opportunity structures that would translate capability into outcomes. That is a different problem than lack of capability. It is also, potentially, a very different opportunity for investors, institutions, and policymakers willing to engage with what is actually there rather than what the numbers say.

Kalahandi in 2026 is developing. It is not yet a place where its best people choose to stay. The distance between those two statements is where the real work of the next decade lives.

Manas Majhi is the founder of Majhi Group and Majhi OS. He grew up in Junagarh, Kalahandi, Odisha.