The Talent I've Watched Leave Kalahandi

The people who left Kalahandi were not the ones who couldn't make it. They were often the best ones, the sharpest students, the most driven, the ones who figured out early that the ceiling in Kalahandi was lower than their ambition. I watched it happen in my own generation. I have watched it happen in the generations since. The leaving is not failure. The question is what it means for the place they left, and whether the pattern is permanent.

What leaving looks like from the inside

When you grow up in Kalahandi and you are good at something, at school, at mathematics, at anything that signals potential, the message you receive is consistent and well-intentioned: get out. Go to Bhubaneswar. Go to Rourkela. Go to Hyderabad or Pune or Bangalore. The people who tell you this are not wrong. They are giving you the advice that the evidence supports. Staying, for most of the people I grew up with who had real capability, would have meant a smaller life.

The leaving happens in stages. First the best students leave for engineering and medical colleges in bigger cities. Then the ones who get jobs leave for the cities where the jobs are. Then the ones who have done well bring their younger siblings. The outflow is not random. It selects systematically for the most capable.

What remains is not representative. This matters for how Kalahandi gets understood from the outside, and for how development policy gets designed, because policy is usually designed in response to what remains rather than in response to what left.

What the district loses

The economic argument for talent retention is straightforward: the people who leave take their human capital, their networks, and eventually their income with them. The remittances come back, and they matter, they are one of the more significant sources of household income for families in districts like Kalahandi. But remittances are a transfer, not a multiplier. They sustain consumption; they do not build institutions.

What the district loses is harder to quantify. It loses the doctors who would have run local clinics. The teachers who would have built local schools into something better than the baseline. The entrepreneurs who would have started businesses that employed people locally and created the kind of economic density that makes a place worth staying in.

This is the compounding dynamic of talent drain: as the capable leave, the reasons to stay become fewer, which causes more capable people to leave, which further reduces the reasons to stay. It is a self-reinforcing loop, and it is very difficult to reverse once it is established.

What I have seen change

I want to be accurate about this, because the story is not only loss.

The digital economy has changed something real in the last several years. A young person in Junagarh with a laptop and a reliable internet connection can now do work that gets paid at rates that were not available to anyone in Kalahandi a decade ago. Freelance technical work, content, design, coding, the geographic premium that once made leaving economically necessary has partially eroded in these categories.

I have met people from Kalahandi who are doing genuinely global work without having relocated. Not many, the internet access is still uneven, the infrastructure is still inconsistent, the mentorship networks are still thin. But the number is growing, and the direction is right.

The question is whether this is a trend or a transformation. A trend means the numbers improve while the structure stays the same, more people access the digital economy, but the underlying dynamic of talent drain continues. A transformation means the structure changes, that Kalahandi begins to retain and attract capability rather than exporting it. The first is happening. The second has not happened yet.

The thing that actually drives retention

I have thought about this for a long time, and the conclusion I keep arriving at is that infrastructure is necessary but not sufficient for talent retention. Roads, power, internet, these reduce the cost of staying. They do not by themselves create the reason to stay.

What creates the reason to stay is economic opportunity, specifically, the presence of businesses and institutions that can absorb and reward capability at a level that competes with what is available elsewhere. This requires not just infrastructure but the density of economic activity that makes it worth building something locally.

That density does not exist yet in Kalahandi in most sectors. The mining operations employ people but do not build the kind of knowledge economy that retains educated young people. The government is the largest employer of credentialed professionals, and government capacity is limited and slow to expand.

The exception I watch most carefully is small manufacturing and agribusiness, sectors where the raw material advantage of the region is real and where the distance from the large metros is less of a disadvantage than in knowledge work. If those sectors develop with enough depth, they create the adjacent economic activity, logistics, services, professional employment, that starts to shift the calculus for a capable person deciding whether to stay or go.

Why I am writing this from here

I left Kalahandi. I built something from outside it, in cities with better infrastructure and denser networks. I am aware of the irony.

What I have tried to do with the writing on this site is make Kalahandi legible, to put into writing what the place actually is, what it produces, what it loses, and what it could become, from the perspective of someone who was shaped by it. Not development tourism. Not poverty narrative. The actual texture of a place that most of the country has never thought carefully about.

The talent that left Kalahandi did not disappear. Some of it is building things in Bangalore and Hyderabad and London and Dubai. Some of it, I hope, is paying attention to what happens next in the place it came from. That attention, translated into investment, into mentorship, into the willingness to build in a place that is harder to build in, is what the transformation, if it happens, will require.

The leaving was rational. The return, in whatever form it takes, is the open question.

The outflow is not random. It selects systematically for the most capable - and what the district loses is not just headcount.

Remittances are a transfer, not a multiplier. They sustain consumption; they do not build institutions. What the district loses is harder to quantify: the doctors, the teachers, the entrepreneurs who would have created local economic density.

Manas Majhi grew up in Junagarh, Kalahandi, Odisha. He writes about opportunity, development, and the systems that fail to distribute either equitably. He is the founder of Majhi Group and Majhi OS.

See also: The Kalahandi Most People Never See, Building from Kalahandi, The Water Paradox: Why Kalahandi's Farms Fail When the Rivers Are Full

Sources

World Bank: Human Capital Index 2024: India Country Profile

McKinsey Global Institute: India's Labour Market: A New Emphasis on Employability

ILO: World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2024