A resource-rich state that’s poor for its people

Odisha has witnessed distress migrations for long, but stemming the crisis will require the state to prioritise people’s rights over its mining and development agenda

Bhargavi S. Rao

An Odisha Tourism ad at the Bhubaneshwar airport tries to attract tourists to the state’s natural treasures. Bhargavi S. Rao/The Migration Story

In late August, I came across a LinkedIn post raising funds to transport the body of a late Odia migrant worker from Kerala back to his home state. This was not just the tragic loss of a young life; it was the reflection of a much larger, systemic failure. Why should the final rites of a migrant from a state so rich in minerals, forests, rivers and fertile soils need to be crowdfunded? And why do so many Odias leave home in search of a dignified life, only to return in coffins or with poor health? This question became the starting point of this article, which is an attempt to look at Odisha’s paradox: a resource-rich land that sees distress migration on a massive scale.

Driving through the hills of Kandhamal district or the forests of Sundargarh, one finds stunning landscapes, meandering rivers, fertile soils and fields of paddy, turmeric and vegetables – all of which should have nurtured prosperity for the people. However, the Niti Aayog’s 2023 report on India’s multidimensional poverty index (MPI) shows that although Odisha’s MPI has reduced from 29.34% in 2015-16 to 15.68% in 2019-21, accessing nutrition, cooking fuel, sanitation and housing is still challenging in different parts of the state.

As a result, people from 14 of the state’s 30 districts, in its southern and western parts, migrate, often in distress, to find work. They go to factories in Gujarat, brick kilns in Andhra Pradesh, restaurants in Kerala, construction sites in Telangana and Karnataka, among other places. This paradox, for a state so rich in minerals and natural resources yet so poor in outcomes for its people, tells us a deeper story about how development has been imagined – and imposed – here.

THE RESOURCE TRAP

Odisha’s rich deposits of iron ore, bauxite, chromite, coal and graphite have played an important role in shaping the state’s industrial development after Independence, especially in the 1990s. The state and central governments exploited these resources and focused on mining and heavy industries as ‘engines of growth’. Steel plants, aluminum smelters and thermal power projects became the face of development and progress.

This emphasis on extraction has produced what scholars call the ‘resource curse’ – revenues from mining have largely accrued to the state and private corporations, while communities in mining belts have borne the social and environmental costs of mining, with limited compensatory benefits. For Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes (who form nearly 40% of the state’s population), mining has not created stable jobs or secure futures. It has uprooted them from the land and forests that have been their safety nets – and continues to do so (see here). They have witnessed displacement, ecological devastation and loss of livelihoods, which is disturbing to say the least.

But Odisha is not just mineral-rich: it is also one of India’s most ecologically blessed landscapes. It is home to two national parks, eighteen wildlife sanctuaries, two tiger reserves and one UNESCO-recognised biosphere reserve. An Odisha Tourism ad at the Bhubaneshwar airport proudly boasts of these, wooing people to travel to the state.

The forests of Simlipal, Satkosia and Bhitarkanika and the Chilika wetlands are indeed biodiversity treasures that have for generations sustained communities with food, fodder, fuel and medicine. Forest products, such as honey, sal leaves, bamboo and medicinal herbs, could be harvested and sold with the participation of forest-dependent people in every stage of the process and with the support of panchayats as per the Eleventh Schedule of the Constitution. This could be a boost for local economies.  

However, instead of making these natural resources the foundations of a green economy that provides livelihoods while ensuring environmental protection, the state has treated them as land banks for mining and industry. The irony is stark: the state’s natural wealth could have made it a leader in climate-resilient, community-driven development; instead, its people have been pushed into cycles of displacement and distress migration.

Bhubaneshwar’s Kuakhai River is one of Odisha’s many natural treasures,

but the resource-rich state still witnesses distress migrations. Bhargavi S. Rao/The Migration Story

THE MANUFACTURING THAT NEVER WAS

The question arises: Why didn’t Odisha build non-mining industries like Karnataka, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu did? I was eager to find out, and the delay of my flight from Bhubaneshwar to Bengaluru serendipitously led to a conversation about this with a fellow passenger, Ashok Kumar Sahu (name changed). Sahu, around 50, who manages a service delivery business in Bengaluru, isn’t an expert, but I found his observations on Odisha’s development story to be insightful.

To begin with, he said that easy money from mining had made it politically attractive. Why would the state invest decades in building manufacturing clusters when royalties and leases from mining filled coffers quickly, he asked. It’s true that Odisha’s manufacturing sector struggled to expand historically. This was in large part due to weak industrial ecosystems, infrastructural gaps, limited supply-chain networks and skill shortages.

Sahu also added that land conflicts run deep in the state. We have seen these conflicts play out between the state and mining corporations one the one hand and people who have occupied these lands for generations on the other. Two cases in point: the Korean steel giant POSCO’s withdrawal from Jagatsinghpur district in the face of people’s resistance, and the Tata Steel plants that were set up in Jajpur district’s Kalinganagar, despite resistance from the people living there.

Additionally, Odisha’s vulnerability to disasters, especially cyclones and floods, have made the state appear “risky” for long-term industrial investment, further entrenching mining. The result? “Unlike Karnataka, which diversified into IT, education and agro-processing, Odisha remained shackled to extraction,” Sahu said.

​​Sahu also narrated how strong community-led movements and initiatives have played a crucial role in protecting and restoring Odisha’s forests, leading to significant conservation of forest land. There was also the struggle of the Dongria Kondh tribe for the Niyamgiri hills against British mining giant Vedanta. The Dongria successfully resisted Vedanta’s plans to build a bauxite mine on lands they had occupied for generations. And the Supreme Court ordered that they had to be consulted before the hills could be used for extraction. It was a struggle they won because they owned it, Sahu added, not one that was ‘delivered’ to them.

FAILED PROMISES LEAD TO MIGRATION

However, these victories have been few. In many tribal belts, welfare delivery has faltered, public schemes aren’t easily accessible, and Panchayati Raj institutions remain weak. The distress migrations – due to mining, development, wildlife conservation and now, the climate crisis – are on-going. In fact, rural communities have become insecure in their agro-pastoral livelihoods that are dependent on rainfall, which has become unpredictable due to climate change.

All of this has forced people to leave these nature-dependent occupations and migrate to the cities in search of work. Men, women and even children travel to faraway states, often ending up in exploitative, bondage-like conditions in brick kilns or at construction sites.

Sahu added that civil society organisations have been tracking out-migration from Odisha – documenting where workers go, maintaining records of families left behind, and trying to create safety nets for those in distress. They help arrange emergency transportation, provide support when wages are withheld, and even step in if there are accidents or deaths. These are critical interventions, but they do what the state should have institutionalised long ago, he emphasised. Migration governance, ensuring safe mobility, legal protections and dignified work conditions, remains tokenistic in Odisha’s official imagination, leaving NGOs and nonprofits to patch solutions for structural and political crises.

Sahu’s wife, Meena (name changed), who works with a nonprofit in Bengaluru, was also waiting with us at the airport. She added, “This is what Odisha looks like – it has not done much for its people, not because it lacks a government, but because it consistently fails to create dignified, sustainable livelihoods for its people, despite being rich in resources.”

Agro-pastoral livelihoods in rural Odisha have become insecure because of unpredicatable rainfall due to climate change, among other factors. Bhargavi S. Rao/The Migration Story

A TALE OF TWO STATES: ODISHA AND KARNATAKA

I first travelled to Odisha as an environmental governance researcher in 2009. When I returned home to Bengaluru from my latest Odisha trip, I spoke to Mani Shankar (name changed), a retired public sector employee, about all that was on my mind – the crowdfunding for the late Odia migrant’s last rites and migrant livelihoods in general. Our conversation threw up questions around the responsibilities of migrants’ source and destination states.

Shankar pointed out that although both Odisha and Karnataka have witnessed agrarian distress, caste discrimination and rural poverty, Karnataka made significant investments in urban centres (Bengaluru and Mysuru, for example), irrigation systems and education. It built manufacturing- and assembly-based industrial clusters and was less dependent on natural-resource extraction — a trajectory quite different from Odisha’s.

When I was on the highway between Daringabadi town and Bhubaneshwar, I noticed that most vehicles were trucks loaded with minerals. As I was leaving this beautiful hilly terrain, I wondered: What will happen now? The land and forests that sustain people in rural Odisha have so often been handed over to corporations in the name of development, while philanthropies and CSR projects only seem to patch up the symptoms without curing the disease.

But a farmer-friend, Vishalakshi Padmanabhan, who works with small and marginal farmers in Odisha and other states, told me that it’s not all gloom and doom. The alternative, she said, lies in investing in people, not just minerals: “Focus on seed banks, millets, agro-processing... and food industries are a great possibility,” she said.

I was also reminded of a conversation I’d had with a saree weaver, whom I had met on one of my trips to western Odisha and who had asked for anonymity. She said, “Handloom, art and craft, community-led eco-tourism are all possible in western Odisha. The region just needs real investments in good education, language skills and healthcare, which will help young people build dignified futures for themselves right here.” She added that Odisha was so rich in natural resources. The thing it really lacked was “the political imagination to move beyond the extractive mindset!”

WHAT SOURCE AND DESTINATION STATES MUST DO

Recently, Karnataka, which attracts migrants from Odisha and elsewhere, passed an important social security law for gig and platform workers. Called The Karnataka Platform-Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Act, 2025, this new law mandates the creation of a statutory welfare board, chaired by the labour minister, with representatives from gig-worker associations, aggregators/platforms and civil society.

According to the law, all gig platforms operating in the state must register with the board and once registered, their workers will receive a unique ID valid across all platforms. Further, a welfare fund, financed by a 1-5% welfare fee on each gig transaction, must be established by the platforms in order to deliver social security benefits to their workers, such as occupational health cover, safety measures, dispute resolution and protections against arbitrary termination.

While the passing of the law has been considered progressive – as migrants are acknowledged as builders of Karnataka’s economy and social security provisions are paired with aggregator compliance and algorithmic accountability – its implementation will take time. Apart from this, there are also significant gaps in the welfare provided to migrant workers and the data about them in Karnataka. For instance, unions have reportedly said that while only 80,000 migrant workers have been registered with the state and that too, primary from Bengaluru, there are probably closer to 20 lakh migrants working across the state.

But this is one only part of the story. It isn’t enough for the states receiving migrants to address their needs; their home states too, in this case, Odisha, which sees severe out-migration, need to address the drivers of migration through local, meaningful and relevant skill development. The challenges on both sides highlight the state of country's migrant crisis: destination states struggle to support the workers they rely on, while source states struggle to address the economic conditions that force their citizens to migrate in the first place.

However, recent news reports on migration from southern Odisha indicate that it has evolved from being chiefly distress-driven to being increasingly adaptive and aspirational. Many migrants now stay away from home for extended periods, not just seasonally, but as part of a deliberate economic strategy to diversify income and handle risk.

Furthermore, other stories show that migration has triggered notable socio-economic changes back home in Odisha: increases in bank account usage, remittances fuelling local investment, girls’ education, and more. These gains, though, are counterbalanced by other challenges, such as emotional strain due to separation from family and a retreat from agriculture. Additionally, for some communities, like the Pano (Scheduled Castes), their caste follows them on the migrant corridor and into their destination city of Surat.

Men, women and children from 14 of Odisha’s 30 districts migrate to faraway states and end up working in exploitative conditions in brick kilns or at construction sites. Bhargavi S. Rao/The Migration Story

ADDRESSING MIGRATION AT A POLICY LEVEL

The Government of Odisha has begun to address that which drives migration through local employment and skill development initiatives. In late 2024, it set up a committee to look into distress migrations and the concerns of migrant workers.

From conversations with Odias during my recent visits, I have gleaned that the state’s response to distress migrations is widely seen as insufficient, leaving migrant workers highly vulnerable to exploitation and precarity in destination states that rely on their labour in construction, gig economies, housekeeping services and so on.

But panchayats in their home states can serve as the first line of support for workers and women, even before they migrate. They can reduce distress migration by creating jobs through MGNREGA, help to build women’s self-help groups under the central government’s Mission Shakti scheme, and support farming, weaving, forest produce procurement and other occupations. Because stronger panchayats mean stronger communities and more dignified livelihoods.

That said, over the years, it is NGOs that have helped to fill gaps in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services, skill-building and entrepreneurship training     , especially in rural parts of Odisha. This is indicative of the state's failure to meet its fundamental obligations to its citizens. Thus, strengthening basic public services and good governance must accompany a shift away from extractive economics.

In a resource-rich land like Odisha, every microregion can be reimagined as a thriving, bustling centre of local climate-friendly livelihoods, with the help of  traditional knowledge and adequate support from state and non-state actors. But until the state’s governance shifts its focus from mining rents to people’s rights, Odias will keep walking away, carrying on their backs the broken promise of development.   

Edited by Subuhi Jiwani

Bhargavi S. Rao is an independent researcher and educator, who works at the intersection of community action and law, policy, planning and governance, bridging grassroots realities with decision-making spaces