The Odyssey of Odisha

If you grew up in Odisha, you know someone who left.

Maybe it was you.

A brother who went to Pune for engineering. A sister who took a job in Bengaluru and stayed. A father who spent the best years of his life working in the Gulf so his children wouldn't have to. A friend who was sharp enough to go anywhere — and did.

The leaving is so constant it barely registers as loss anymore. It's just what happens. You grow up, you study, you leave. That is the Odisha story for a generation.

I was part of it. I left Kalahandi at eighteen on a 32-hour train to Delhi. I didn't know a single person in the city. When I arrived at Hazrat Nizamuddin station it felt like stepping onto a different planet — the scale of it, the noise, the density of everything. I stood there with everything I owned and understood, in my bones, that I had done what people from places like Kalahandi do.

I had left.

Not because I wanted to. Because what I wanted to build couldn't be built where I was from.

What We Left Behind

I grew up with a classmate who was one of the sharpest people I have ever met.

For six years — from seventh standard through twelfth — he finished in the top three of our class. Every year. He thought faster than most. He remembered everything. Teachers called on him when they wanted something answered correctly. He was the kind of person who raises the level of every room he walks into.

We lost touch when I moved to Delhi. Years later, at a gathering back home, I found him again. I asked what he'd been doing.

A family situation after school. Financial pressure. The kind of compounding difficulty that doesn't leave much room for choice. He had set up a small shop. He was getting by.

The sharpness was still there. I could hear it in the way he spoke, in how he followed every thread of the conversation.

It had just never had anywhere to go.

I have thought about him more times than I can count. Not out of pity — he would hate that, and he wouldn't deserve it. But because his story is not his alone. It is the story of Odisha, repeated across every district, every decade, every generation of people this state produced and then couldn't hold.

The people were never the problem.

What Odisha Is

Let me tell you what this state is — not what the reports say it has, but what it actually is.

Odisha is the place where the language sounds different from every other language in India. Softer. More musical than outsiders expect. Where the food is distinct enough that Odias living elsewhere spend years trying to recreate it and never fully can. Where the temples have been standing for a thousand years and somehow that doesn't feel like the past — it feels like something still alive.

It is the state that produced Odissi, one of the most sophisticated classical dance forms in the world, in villages that most people in India's big cities couldn't find on a map.

And it is a state that has, for most of its modern history, watched its wealth leave.

The ore from the hills of Keonjhar and Kalahandi has been building cities across Asia for decades. The coal from Sundargarh has been generating electricity for industries that employed people far from Odisha. The minerals went out. The value was created somewhere else. And the people — the engineers, the doctors, the teachers, the founders — followed the value, because that is what people do.

There is no villain in this story. That is what makes it so hard.

It is simply what happens when a place has everything it needs and hasn't yet built the systems that keep what it produces.

The Honest Part

Here is what nobody says out loud.

Odisha is a state you love in a way that's difficult to explain to people who didn't grow up there. You miss it at specific moments — during the Rath Yatra, or in the middle of a Bengaluru monsoon that doesn't smell right, or when you eat something that is almost but not quite what your mother makes. You carry it with you in ways you don't always notice until something pulls at the thread.

But Odisha is also the state that made you leave.

That tension is real. The place that shaped you produced a system that couldn't fully use you. You came back for festivals and felt the warmth of home — and then you got on a train and went back to where the work was. Because the work wasn't there yet.

The people who stayed sometimes resent the ones who left. The ones who left sometimes romanticise what they escaped. Both feelings make sense. Neither is the full truth.

You can love a place completely and still have needed to leave it. You can be proud of where you're from and honest about what it cost you.

The full truth is more complicated: you can carry Odisha with you for twenty years in another city and still not be sure whether you should have stayed.

I don't have a clean answer to that. I'm not sure anyone does.

What I have is a sense — growing stronger over the past few years — that the calculation is beginning to change.

Something Is Shifting

The Odia professionals I know who left are not the same people they were when they left. They have built things. Learned things. Developed expertise that didn't exist in the communities they came from. They carry networks, capital, and knowledge that Odisha has never fully been able to use — because most of them have never been given a real reason to bring it home.

But the conversations are different now. I can hear it.

People who left are recalculating. Not in large numbers — not yet. But in a way that didn't exist five years ago. They are weighing the life Odisha quietly offers against the cost of the cities they moved to. The connectivity that wasn't there a decade ago. The ability to work from anywhere. The family that stayed. The feeling — unfamiliar and worth examining — that the state they left might actually be somewhere to build something now, not just somewhere to visit.

Bhubaneswar is becoming a city that people choose, not just a city they pass through. That is a new thing.

It is not complete. Anyone who tells you the gap has closed is not being honest with you. But the direction has genuinely shifted. And direction, held long enough, becomes destination.

Odisha 2036

I think about my classmate when I think about what this state could look like in ten years.

Not the general version — not statistics and projections. The specific version. I think about what his life looks like in a version of Odisha where the systems exist to find people like him and give what they have somewhere to go.

A company in Kalahandi that was actually looking for the sharpest person in the district. An opportunity that didn't require a 32-hour train to become real. A system — built by people from Odisha who understand what Odisha has — that could recognise what he was.

That is what I mean by Odisha 2036.

Not ships and ports and investment figures. The classmate who doesn't have to set up a small shop because no one was looking for him. The engineer who comes back from Bengaluru not because she had to but because something real was being built here and she wanted to be part of it. The child growing up in Bolangir or Baripada or Bhawanipatna knowing that the best version of her life doesn't require her to leave everyone she loves behind.

All of that is possible.

I say that not as a slogan but as someone who has spent twenty years watching what Odia people do the moment conditions allow. The capability is not the question. It has never been the question. What has been missing is the conditions.

The conditions are being built.

It's Ours

I am not writing this to tell you what to do. You know your situation better than I do.

I'm writing it because I think people from Odisha deserve to know that something is changing. That the state which made so many of us leave is, slowly and genuinely, becoming a place where what we built elsewhere might have somewhere to land.

Whether you left and want to come back. Whether you stayed and wonder if it was worth it. Whether you're still deciding.

The answer isn't the same for everyone. It probably isn't even the same from one year to the next.

But I know this: the Odisha that exists in 2036 will be shaped by the decisions that people from Odisha make in the years before it. It will be built — or not built — by the ones who are from here. Not by policy. Not by investment summits. By the specific, quiet, daily decisions of people who carry this place with them and have to decide what to do with that.

I have made my bet.

The sharpest mind I ever sat next to in a classroom deserved better conditions than the ones he got. So did a million others like him, from a state that has been producing remarkable people and under-rewarding them for too long.

That can change.

It is changing.

"The future of Odisha will not be decided by what lies beneath the ground. It will be decided by what its people build above it."

Manas Majhi grew up in Kalahandi, Odisha. He is the founder of Majhi Group and Majhi OS.