Beyond GDP: What a Developed Odisha Must Be Answerable For
Economic growth is necessary for development. But it is not a definition of it. Odisha has been growing. The harder question is what that growth has actually built.
Founder, Majhi Group & Majhi OS
I was born in Kalahandi, one of the most consistently underdeveloped districts in one of India's more underdeveloped states. The fact that I am now building companies internationally is not evidence that the system worked. It is evidence that the system occasionally produces exceptions, and that exceptions are not the same as outcomes.
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?
Economic growth is necessary for development. 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 that risk.
If the answer to that question 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.
If development cannot answer for the child born in Kalahandi today, it is not development. It is a number.
See also: Odisha's Untapped Potential, Paradip: The Port That Odisha Has Not Yet Figured Out How to Use, Why Odisha Matters
Sources
UNDP: Human Development Report 2024: Breaking the Gridlock
World Bank: Human Capital Index 2024
McKinsey Global Institute: India's Turning Point: An Economic Agenda for the Decade
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Odisha's economic growth translating into human development?
Partially. Odisha's SGDP growth has been above the national average for most of the past decade, and infrastructure investment, roads, ports, power, urban development in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack, is real and visible. Health outcomes have improved: maternal and infant mortality have fallen substantially. But the distribution of this growth is uneven. Western and southern Odisha, including the KBK region, continues to lag on almost every human development indicator despite holding most of the state's natural resources. The gap between growth numbers and ground-level experience is widest in the districts furthest from the coast.
What does real development look like for Odisha beyond GDP?
Real development for Odisha means: a young person from Kalahandi being able to build a career there rather than being forced to migrate; tribal communities in Kandhamal and Malkangiri having access to education and health systems comparable to Bhubaneswar; manufacturing and services sectors diversified enough that the economy is not vulnerable to mineral price cycles; and a political economy where development decisions are made based on human need rather than proximity to existing wealth. GDP growth is a necessary but insufficient measure, the harder accountability questions are about who the growth reaches and what it builds.
What are Odisha's human development challenges?
Odisha's primary human development challenges are: persistent educational quality gaps between urban and rural areas; high rates of skilled emigration (talent drain to Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Pune); incomplete health coverage in tribal and remote districts; agricultural vulnerability in rain-dependent western districts; and economic exclusion of scheduled tribe and scheduled caste communities, who make up a large share of the population. The state has made measurable progress on each of these since 2000, but the absolute gap to national standards in most areas remains large.
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