Rain, Debt, and Distance

Odisha has two migrations. One is the one on the website: the engineer leaving Rourkela for Bangalore, the founder building a company that serves clients abroad. That migration is a choice. This essay is about the other one: migration driven by survival rather than ambition, and it has a documented history running back more than a century.

The Year With No Number

In 1865, the monsoon failed across the Odisha coast. The crop failure that followed produced what is remembered locally as Na'anka Durbhikshya, the Famine of the Ninth Year, named for the reigning year of the Puri king. Sources differ on the precise toll, in part because they define the affected region differently: the most-cited figures put deaths at roughly one million people, or about a third of the population in the worst-hit coastal districts of Cuttack, Puri, and Balasore. Grain continued moving out of the region even as people starved. The colonial administration's response was slow enough, and its failures serious enough, that the government convened its own Famine Commission, which reported in April 1867 and found administrative negligence a contributing cause alongside the drought itself.

Historians who have studied the famine's aftermath point to a lasting shift in landholding: many farmers, unable to recover from the crop failure, lost land to moneylenders and zamindars in the years that followed. That change in who owned the land, and who therefore controlled access to it, is part of what later research connects to the region's long-running vulnerability to seasonal distress.

The System That Grew From the Debt

Migration researchers working in western Odisha describe a labor arrangement known as dadan: a contractor advances cash to a household before the monsoon, against a promise of labor later, typically at a brick kiln outside the state. The advance covers what the household needs to get through a lean season; the debt is worked off, usually over several months, far from home.

The districts most associated with this form of migration are known collectively as the KBK belt (Kalahandi, Bolangir, and Koraput) along with neighboring Nuapada, Boudh, Sonepur, and Bargarh. The Migration Information and Resource Centre (MiRC) has estimated that more than 60,000 families, or roughly 200,000 people, migrate out of these districts each year to brick kilns and informal work in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka. A further 40,000 to 50,000 people, by the same estimate, work seasonally at roughly 150 brick kiln units within about 40 kilometers of Cuttack and Bhubaneswar.

The Other Corridor

A separate and longer-standing migration corridor connects Ganjam district, in southern Odisha, to Surat's power-loom and textile industry. Labor-rights organizations, including Aajeevika Bureau and Aide et Action, have estimated the number of Ganjam-origin workers in Surat at any given time at somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000, a figure that fluctuates seasonally and is difficult to pin down precisely because most of this migration goes unregistered.

That undercounting shows up starkly in government data: a 2016 Times of India report on Odisha migration cited official figures recording only 4,966 labourers as having migrated out of Ganjam for work, a small fraction of independent estimates for the same district.

Migration researchers note that workers return to cities like Surat each festival and wedding season, from October to December, because their home districts have little seasonal employment to offer instead.

A separate study by the Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development (CMID) and Gram Vikas, focused on Jagannathprasad block in Ganjam, found that migration (largely to Surat, drawing on decades of established social and family networks) brings more than ₹520 million into that single block each year in remittances.

What the Numbers Show, and What They Don't

According to a state migration profile compiled from OCAC and related data, recorded out-migration from Odisha rose from roughly 55,000 people in 2007 to about 146,000 in 2015. Researchers who study the state's migration patterns, including Aide et Action's Umi Daniel, have repeatedly noted that official figures understate the real scale of movement, because much of it happens through informal contractor networks that are never registered with any government agency.

On Rain, Irrigation, and the Dry Spell That Still Exists

The root condition behind this migration has not disappeared. Academic studies of the KBK belt describe agriculture there as still largely rainfed, with low irrigation coverage and high sensitivity to year-to-year rainfall variability, conditions researchers have directly linked to the recurring droughts and distress migration that mark the region.

There has been real investment against that gap. The central government's Surface Minor Irrigation programme was specifically extended to cover the KBK region, and as of May 2026, 5,878 of a planned 7,792 irrigation schemes under that programme had been completed nationally, with 1,914 still under implementation. Odisha's own Department of Water Resources reports ongoing dam, barrage, and lift-irrigation projects across Bolangir, Kalahandi, Ganjam, and neighboring districts in its most recent activity report.

That investment has produced measurable change in places. A 2021 report found that a 2020 state government assessment recorded the KBK corridor's first food surplus, and that Kalahandi, helped in part by irrigation from the Indravati Dam, had become Odisha's second-largest rice-producing district. But the same reporting found irrigation coverage still uneven within the corridor: farmers in Bolangir were described as remaining more dependent on rainfall than farmers in Kalahandi, where dam-fed irrigation has expanded further.

Further south, in Koraput, a substantial share of cultivated land is still reported to depend on rainfall alone, supporting only a single paddy crop each year, with land left fallow after harvest for want of irrigation infrastructure, a gap that rainwater-harvesting projects in the district have only recently begun to address.

In other words: the dry spell that pushed migration a century and a half ago has not been closed everywhere, only unevenly narrowed. Where irrigation has arrived, migration pressure appears to have eased. Where it hasn't, the same seasonal calculation that has driven this migration for generations still holds.

The dry spell that pushed migration a century and a half ago has not been closed everywhere, only unevenly narrowed. Where irrigation has arrived, migration pressure appears to have eased.

Two Migrations, One State

The state's Silicon-age story, the IT parks, the startups, the engineers who now have the option to build from Bhubaneswar rather than leave it, is real, and it matters for the people it reaches.

It exists alongside a second, older, and larger pattern: households in Odisha's most rain-dependent districts continuing to send workers hundreds of kilometers away, into brick kilns and power looms, because local land and local work still cannot reliably carry them through the year. That pattern traces back at least as far as the 1866 famine and the landholding shifts that followed it, and by every available measure, it has not stopped.

Both migrations are part of the same state. The open question, not answered by this data, only raised by it, is whether the institutions building Odisha's technology economy will also reach the districts still sending families to brick kilns each dry season, or whether the two Odishas will simply continue running in parallel. And beneath that question sits an older one, asked in some form since 1866: when will reliable irrigation finally reach the districts still waiting on the rain, and close the dry spell for good?

See also: Odisha's Resource Trap, The Future of Odisha, Odisha Economy: Current State and Trajectory

Sources

Odisha Famine Commission Report, 1867

The Great Orissa Famine 1866 (Na'Anka Durbhikshya), ed. Anil Dhir & Ramesh Chandra Mohapatra

"Odisha Dadan Migration: Patterns and BJP govt response," Organiser, Aug. 26, 2025

"Migration Profile of Odisha with focus on Bhubaneswar" (OCAC-sourced data)

"Odisha Migrant Workers Return To Gruelling Shifts, Poor Wages," IndiaSpend, Dec. 8, 2020

"Labour Migration from Rural Odisha, Jagannathprasad Block, Ganjam," CMID & Gram Vikas

"Unpacking the migrant economy," The Migration Story

"Impact of Climate Variability on Crop Yield in Kalahandi, Bolangir, and Koraput Districts of Odisha, India," MDPI Climate, 2019

"Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana (PMKSY)," India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), accessed 2026

Department of Water Resources, Government of Odisha, Activity Report 2023-24

"Hunger deaths to 'rice bowl': How Odisha's Kalahandi-Balangir-Koraput corridor turned a corner," ThePrint, Dec. 22, 2021

"How Rainwater Harvesting Is Transforming Seasonal Farming into Year-Round Livelihoods in Odisha's Koraput District," Down To Earth

Aajeevika Bureau, labour migration research, Ganjam-Surat corridor