Odisha's Untapped Potential

I am from Odisha. Specifically from Kalahandi — a district that appears, when it appears at all, in discussions of poverty, drought, and underdevelopment.

I want to write a different kind of essay about Odisha.

Not because the challenges are not real. They are. But because the story of a place is not only its deficits. It is also its assets — and Odisha has assets that are consistently underestimated, including by the people who live there.

What Odisha actually has

Start with the basics.

Odisha has the longest coastline of any state on India's eastern seaboard — 480 kilometers. It has deep-water ports and access to the Bay of Bengal. It has a geography that makes it a natural logistics hub for eastern India and for maritime trade with Southeast Asia.

It has mineral wealth that is genuinely extraordinary. Odisha produces about 25% of India's iron ore and is among the top producers of chromite, bauxite, and coal. The industrial infrastructure built around this wealth — the steel plants, the aluminum complexes, the power stations — is substantial.

It has a cultural heritage that is among the richest in India. The temples of Bhubaneswar and Puri, the dance tradition of Odissi, the craft traditions of Pipli and Raghurajpur — these are not marginal cultural assets. They are world-class, and they are not adequately leveraged.

The gap between potential and reality

And yet: Odisha's per-capita income sits well below the national average. Its Human Development Index scores lag behind states with fewer natural resources. Its educated youth leave in large numbers — to Bangalore, to Mumbai, to the Gulf states — and do not always return.

When I came back to Odisha — after years in Delhi, after building the expertise and the business — I noticed something I had not expected. The infrastructure gap that had made leaving feel necessary had closed. 4G was everywhere. The connectivity that once required being in a metro was available in the district I grew up in.

I could have built from here.

That sentence carried more weight than I expected. Not as nostalgia — I don't have a clean relationship with the idea of staying. But as evidence. The infrastructure gap that had made leaving feel necessary had closed quietly, while everyone was still operating on the old assumption that it hadn't. The map was wrong. The territory had moved.

I am not sure that is true for every field, or that every gap is closed. But it is true for more than people assume. There are lakhs of young people from Odisha with the capability to build, to practise their profession, to follow their work — who left because the infrastructure wasn't there, and haven't recalculated since it arrived.

The talent drain is real. But part of it is now running on an outdated map.

The gap between what Odisha has and what Odisha achieves is one of the more frustrating puzzles in Indian development economics. Some of it is governance — Odisha has had periods of strong governance and periods of significant failure, and the correlation between the two and economic outcomes is direct and measurable. Some of it is infrastructure — roads, airports, digital connectivity that have improved dramatically over the past two decades, but from a starting point so low that meaningful gaps remain. And some of it is human capital — an education system in rural Odisha that is better than it was but still not what it needs to be, feeding a talent drain that compounds with every cohort that leaves and doesn't return.

What could change

I think about this through the lens of the next decade — because Odisha is at an inflection point.

The minerals are real, and the global demand for India's critical minerals is rising as supply chains shift and EV batteries require resources that Odisha has. This is a window.

The coastline is real, and India's maritime ambitions are growing. The investment in ports and logistics infrastructure is accelerating. Odisha is positioned to benefit.

The cultural heritage is real, and the global appetite for authentic, deep cultural experience is growing. Odisha has what most of the world is looking for. It has not yet built the infrastructure to deliver it.

What Odisha needs is not external salvation. It is internal conviction — the willingness of its institutions, its businesses, and its people to believe that the gap between what Odisha is and what it could be is closeable.

I believe it is. I have to believe it is.

It's where I'm from.