Beyond GDP: What a Developed Odisha Must Be Answerable For

Economic growth is necessary for development. But it is not a definition of it.

History offers no shortage of examples where rising output coexisted with entrenched disadvantage, spatial inequality, and limited social mobility. Odisha is not immune to this risk.

The conversations about development in Odisha tend to stay at the level of GDP figures, investment announcements, infrastructure projects, and headline rankings. These things matter. But they don't answer the most important question a society must ask of itself:

Does a child born today, in any district of this state, have a fair chance at a healthy, skilled, and dignified life — without being forced to leave?

If the answer is uncertain, development is incomplete.

What "fair shot" actually means

A fair shot does not mean guaranteed success or equal outcomes. It means equal access to opportunity, regardless of whether a child is born in Koraput or Khordha, Malkangiri or Mayurbhanj.

This reframing matters. Once you shift the question from did the GDP grow? to did that growth expand the real choices available to people who didn't already have choices — the picture changes.

A fair shot begins with a healthy start. No child's future should be compromised by preventable malnutrition, untreated anemia, unsafe drinking water, or the absence of a functional primary health centre within reach. Survival is not development. It is the precondition for it.

A fair shot requires that skills learned in this state are marketable in this state — not just valuable as a ticket out. When the only path to a decent income is migration, a state is exporting its people rather than developing them. The difference between temporary mobility and forced exit is a meaningful one, and Odisha has not always been on the right side of it.

A fair shot means that where you are born does not determine what you can become. The distance between Koraput and Bhubaneswar — in health outcomes, school quality, infrastructure, and economic opportunity — should be closing, not holding steady.

The growth that looks like development but isn't

Odisha has grown. The headline numbers are real. Industrial investment has arrived. New highways run through places that had none. Pockets of the state look genuinely transformed.

But there is a version of growth that is wide and shallow — that moves the state-level numbers without moving the lived reality of the median citizen. When growth is concentrated in a few anchor sectors and a few geographies, it does not automatically diffuse. It accumulates.

Odisha's growth has been, in significant measure, extraction-led. More than 30 percent of the state's SGDP comes from mines and minerals. That number appears in budget speeches as a source of pride. It should also appear as a source of concern.

The minerals are finite. The iron ore, bauxite, and coal will not run out on a single day — but they will become economically irrelevant before the physical reserves are exhausted. The real deadline is not geological depletion. It is the moment when global demand shifts, energy transition accelerates, or downstream manufacturing moves elsewhere — and the state finds itself with dug-up land, depleted reserves, and a workforce trained to extract but never to build.

That transition window — from extraction to diversification — is not unlimited. States that have navigated it successfully did so early, deliberately, and on terms they controlled. The states that missed the window did not fail suddenly. They became irrelevant gradually.

Under-leveraged, not underdeveloped

Odisha is not underdeveloped. That framing is both inaccurate and limiting.

Odisha is under-leveraged. The distinction matters.

Underdeveloped suggests absence — missing infrastructure, missing capital, missing institutions. Under-leveraged points to something different: the assets exist, the potential is real, but the conversion to broad-based prosperity has not happened.

Odisha has one of India's longest coastlines. Two deep-draft ports. A dominant share of India's aluminium and steel capacity. Institutions — IIT, AIIMS, XIMB — that produce talent at scale. A geography that sits at the natural intersection of eastern India's industrial corridor and the Bay of Bengal's maritime routes.

Resource-rich. Value-poor. The wealth extracted here has largely left. The jobs have not always stayed. The income depth has not kept pace with the growth numbers. This is not a new pattern — extractive growth without downstream industrial development is one of the oldest traps in economic history. What makes it urgent now is that the diversification window is narrow and the alternatives are clearer than they have ever been.

What we are leaving behind

The question I keep returning to is not what Odisha's GDP will be in 2036. It is what we will leave behind for the generation being born now.

If nothing structural changes: dug-up land, exhausted reserves, limited jobs, and a generation whose best option is still to leave.

That is not development. It is consumption of a state's inheritance.

A developed Odisha is not defined by its headline growth rate. It is defined by whether the child born in Kalahandi today — my district, one of the state's most underserved — grows up with a real shot at a good life in the place she was born.

Not because she is shielded from the world, but because the world's opportunities have been made accessible to her. In health. In skills. In employment. In dignity.

If development cannot answer for that child, it is not development.

It is a number.