How Odisha Has Changed in the Last Twenty Years

When I was starting my first venture and trying to run it from Odisha, I went through BSNL ADSL, WLL, and eventually VSAT trying to find something that worked. The latency killed everything that required real-time communication. Client calls dropped. File transfers timed out. The business had to run despite the infrastructure, not with it.

JioFiber now reaches Junagarh.

That compression — from unusable to functional in under a decade — is the most honest summary of what has changed in Odisha. The infrastructure gap that defined life in the interior for most of my childhood and early career has substantially closed. Power is more reliable. Roads reach places they didn't. Connectivity that was a luxury is becoming a baseline. These are not small things. They are the substrate for everything else.

But they are not the whole story. And understanding the difference between what changed and what hasn't is what makes the observation useful.

What the connectivity shift actually produced

When I left Junagarh at eighteen for an engineering college in Delhi, the shock was not just the scale of the city. It was the informational distance. I had grown up in an Odia-medium government school with genuinely poor spoken English and Hindi. I did not fully understand how significant that gap was until I walked into a room in Delhi and realised everyone around me appeared to know something I didn't — not knowledge, exactly, but orientation. They knew how things worked. I was reading the manual in real time.

That gap existed because information in Kalahandi moved through people. If you didn't know the right person, you didn't know. The networks were local and the local networks, for most of what the professional world required, were thin.

That is fundamentally different now. A young person in Junagarh today can watch the same content as someone in Bangalore. They can build skills and apply for work without the prior step of leaving. I have met people from Kalahandi doing genuinely global work without having relocated — not many, not yet, but the direction is right. The informational distance that shaped my generation's experience of growing up there has compressed in ways that are hard to overstate.

What I see through the work I do

I have placed VP and C-suite leaders in companies across London, Dubai, Singapore, and New York — building that work from the background of Junagarh and an Odia-medium school and 184 job rejections before my first professional role. The geography of where you start turns out to be more arbitrary than people told me it would be.

What I have watched change, through that work, is the global perception of what Odisha produces.

Five years ago, when I presented a candidate from Bhubaneswar or Rourkela to a global hiring committee, the geography was a conversation point. Is there infrastructure. Can this person operate internationally. The questions were not hostile — they were genuinely uncertain. Odisha was not on the map that most global employers carried.

That is changing. The quality of technical and operational work coming out of the state has made the geography less of a variable. The conversation about Odisha candidates in global companies has shifted from "can they operate at this level?" to "how do we find more of them?" That shift — quiet, unmeasured, not appearing in any report — is one of the more significant changes I have watched happen in the last decade.

What has not changed

I go back to Junagarh regularly. The town is visibly different from the one I grew up in — better roads, more reliable power, a water supply that wasn't consistent when I was young. These changes are real and they matter.

Junagarh still needs a medical college. It still needs an engineering college. The foundation exists — a town with administrative history and existing infrastructure that could support institutions of that kind. What hasn't followed is the investment that would make it a place young people from Kalahandi can build careers without leaving.

The talent drain logic has not reversed. The sharpest students still leave, first for Bhubaneswar, then further. The reasons are rational — the economic opportunities that would retain them at scale don't yet exist in the district. Infrastructure reduces the cost of staying. It doesn't by itself create the reason to stay. That requires economic density: businesses that absorb and reward capability at a level that competes with what's available elsewhere. That density doesn't exist yet in most of Kalahandi, and the government remains the dominant employer of credentialed professionals there.

This is the distinction the optimists miss. Odisha improved the infrastructure. It has not yet built the institutional layer — the colleges, hospitals, businesses, professional services — that makes leaving unnecessary. Those are different problems, and they are at different stages of being solved.

What this period looks like from where I stand

Twenty years is enough time to see a trajectory. The trajectory is real and it is better than the coverage suggests.

A state that had unreliable power, unusable roads in the interior, and effectively no internet connectivity now has JioFiber reaching district towns. A capital that was quiet and administrative has economic density. A generation has information access that my generation did not.

The remaining work is institutional. Medical colleges, engineering colleges, the private sector thickness that creates local economic opportunity, the conditions that make it rational for a capable twenty-five-year-old to stay or return. That work is slower and harder than infrastructure, because infrastructure is a government problem with government tools. Institutional density requires private investment, and private investment follows economic activity that is already there.

The question Odisha now faces is not whether it can develop — the trajectory answers that. The question is whether it develops fast enough to retain the people it's already producing, before they leave and the decision to stay becomes harder to revisit.

I built something global from a starting point that should not, by conventional logic, have made that possible. The starting point has improved for the generation after me. Whether it improves fast enough, in the right ways, is the open question I watch most closely from the work I do.