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Chapter 4: The Missing Tracks — Infrastructure Delhi Didn’t Build

In 1955, a survey was completed for a railway line connecting Talcher in Angul district to Bimlagarh in Sundargarh district — a 149.78-kilometre route through some of the most mineral-dense terrain in India. The Talcher coalfield sits at one end. The iron ore and manganese deposits of Sundargarh sit at the other. Between them lies a corridor that, by any rational infrastructure calculus, should have been connected by rail within a decade.

The project was formally sanctioned by the Government of India in 2003-04 — forty-eight years after the survey. As of 2024, approximately 26 percent of the physical work is complete, including a 20-kilometre stretch between Talcher and Sunakhani and ongoing work on a 30.5-kilometre stretch toward Khamar. The estimated cost has risen to Rs 1,928 crore, of which Rs 839 crore has been spent. The target completion date, originally March 2022, has been pushed to December 2025. Nobody expects that date to hold.

Seventy years. From survey to roughly one-quarter completion. For a railway line in a mineral corridor that generates thousands of crores in freight revenue annually.

This is not a story about one delayed railway project. It is a story about what Delhi chose not to build in Odisha — the railway lines, the port infrastructure, the national highways that connect a state’s resources to the national economy but do not connect its people to economic opportunity. The missing tracks are not an oversight. They are the physical signature of political marginality.

The Revenue Paradox: What Odisha Pays, What Odisha Gets

Before examining the specific infrastructure gaps, establish the baseline asymmetry, because without it the delays look like ordinary bureaucratic incompetence rather than structural neglect.

Odisha contributes more than Rs 15,000 crore annually to the revenues of Indian Railways. The bulk of this comes from freight — coal from Talcher and the Ib Valley, iron ore from Keonjhar and Sundargarh, bauxite, manganese, chromite, and finished steel from the Rourkela and Kalinganagar industrial complexes. The East Coast Railway zone, which covers most of Odisha, consistently ranks among the highest revenue-generating zones in the Indian Railways system. In FY 2025-26, East Coast Railway’s total originating earnings reached Rs 23,959 crore, with goods (freight) earnings alone at Rs 21,749 crore.

Now look at what that revenue has purchased in terms of infrastructure.

Odisha’s railway route length is approximately 2,500 kilometres. The railway density — route kilometres per 1,000 square kilometres of area — is 15.03 km, against a national average of 19.00 km. This puts Odisha below every contiguous state: West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh all have higher railway density. For a state that generates among the highest freight revenues in the country, the rail network is conspicuously thin.

Think of this in software terms. Odisha is a microservice that processes a massive volume of requests (freight traffic) but runs on underprovisioned infrastructure. The throughput is high, the latency is growing, and the system administrators (Indian Railways) have been using the revenue generated by this service to build capacity elsewhere in the cluster while leaving the core service on hardware that should have been upgraded decades ago.

This is not a metaphor. It is a description of how Indian Railways has historically operated in mineral-rich states. The freight revenue from Odisha subsidizes passenger services and infrastructure development across the national network. The cross-subsidy is built into Indian Railways’ financial model: freight pays for passengers. And because Odisha generates disproportionate freight revenue, it contributes disproportionately to the subsidy — without receiving proportionate infrastructure investment in return.

The Ghost Lines: Railways That Took Decades

The Talcher-Bimlagarh line is not an anomaly. It is the most extreme example of a pattern that repeats across Odisha’s railway history.

Khurda Road-Bolangir: Thirty Years and Counting

The Khurda Road-Bolangir railway line was surveyed in 1945. It was sanctioned in 1994-95. The project connects the coastal plains of Odisha, centered on the state capital Bhubaneswar, to the western interior districts of Boudh, Phulbani, and Bolangir — some of the most economically deprived and geographically isolated regions in the state.

The line is 301 kilometres long. As of late 2024, 199 kilometres have been commissioned, including a 106-kilometre stretch from Khurda Road to Daspalla and a 93-kilometre stretch from Bolangir to Boudh. The remaining 75 kilometres — the segment between Purunakatak and Daspalla — passes through challenging terrain in the Eastern Ghats, requiring seven tunnels totaling 12.76 kilometres. The revised completion deadline is December 2026.

Thirty years from sanction to projected completion, if the deadline holds. The people of Boudh and Bolangir have spent three decades watching successive Railway Budgets announce allocations for their line, watching the money dribble in at rates that guarantee perpetual delay, and watching the same project appear in campaign speeches of politicians from every party that has held power in Delhi during this period.

The economic impact of the delay is measurable. Western Odisha’s districts — Bolangir, Nuapada, Kalahandi — are the origin points of Odisha’s seasonal migration crisis. Hundreds of thousands of workers from these districts migrate annually to brick kilns in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, to construction sites in Gujarat and Karnataka, to agricultural labour in Punjab. They migrate because there are no local industries, no accessible markets, no infrastructure that would make economic activity viable in their home districts. The missing railway line is not the sole cause of this migration — the causes are structural and multi-dimensional — but it is a necessary condition that has never been met.

If this assessment is wrong, it would be because the remaining 75 kilometres of tunneling get completed ahead of schedule and the line generates the kind of economic activity that transforms the western interior. I would put the probability of completion by December 2026 at roughly 30 percent, given the engineering challenges and the history of missed deadlines.

Haridaspur-Paradip: The Port Without a Line

The Haridaspur-Paradip railway line, an 82-kilometre connection between the East Coast Railway mainline and India’s largest major port by cargo volume, was sanctioned in 1995-96. The line is being executed by RVNL, a Railway Ministry public sector undertaking, and its performance has been, to put it charitably, below par — despite the state government having acquired and handed over all the required land.

A port that handles 150 million tonnes of cargo annually, operating with a railway connection that was promised three decades ago and has been delivered in fits and starts. The line is now operational in sections, but the timeline speaks for itself: a connection between a major port and the national rail network, in a country that talks constantly about logistics efficiency and port-led development, took longer to build than many ports take to be conceived, constructed, and surpass their initial capacity targets.

Angul-Sukinda: Where Blame Shifts

The Angul-Duburi-Sukinda railway line, 90 kilometres connecting the coal belt to the chromite belt, was sanctioned in 1997-98. This project has been marked by a blame game between the state and central governments. Land acquisition formalities were completed for only 38 of the 69 villages involved, with the state government’s non-cooperation cited as the cause of delays for the remaining 31 villages. The central government points at the state; the state points at the centre. The railway remains unbuilt. The minerals move by road, destroying highways that the state must then repair at its own expense.

The Pattern: Why These Lines Don’t Get Built

Four major railway projects, all sanctioned between 1994 and 2004, all running decades behind schedule. To treat this as coincidence or routine Indian bureaucratic delay would be to miss the system that produces the delays.

The mechanism is straightforward. Indian Railways allocates capital expenditure to projects based on a combination of operational priority, political pressure, and available budget. Projects that serve commercially important routes — the Dedicated Freight Corridors, the high-speed rail network, the Metro systems in major cities — receive consistent, large allocations. Projects in states with high political weight — Uttar Pradesh’s 80 Lok Sabha seats, Maharashtra’s 48, West Bengal’s 42 — receive attention because governments in Delhi need those seats to stay in power.

Odisha has 21 Lok Sabha seats. That is 3.87 percent of the 543-seat Lok Sabha. It is, in the calculus of Indian electoral politics, dispensable. No prime ministerial candidate has ever needed Odisha’s 21 seats to form government. No government formation has ever hinged on an Odia party’s support. This arithmetic has consequences that are not abstract. They manifest as railway lines that take seventy years, as port connections that take three decades, as mineral corridors that generate billions in freight revenue but lack the infrastructure to support the communities that live along them.

The allocation pattern tells the story. The average annual railway investment in Odisha during 2009-14 was approximately Rs 838 crore. This number increased significantly under the BJP government: Rs 10,586 crore in 2024-25, Rs 10,599 crore in 2025-26, and Rs 10,928 crore in 2026-27. The government has announced Rs 90,659 crore worth of railway projects over five years and describes these as “record allocations.”

They are record allocations. And they raise the obvious question: if Rs 10,000 crore annually is the right level of investment for a state that generates Rs 15,000+ crore in railway revenue, what was Rs 838 crore? The answer, delivered without any hint of irony by successive Railway Ministers, is: it was what was available. Which is another way of saying: Odisha’s infrastructure was underfunded for decades not because the money wasn’t there but because it was spent elsewhere, on states whose votes mattered more.

The post-2024 surge in allocations coincides, not coincidentally, with two developments: the BJP’s sweep of 20 out of 21 Lok Sabha seats in Odisha in the 2024 elections, and the BJP forming the state government for the first time. The “double engine” — the same party in Delhi and Bhubaneswar — has delivered higher allocations. Whether this represents a genuine recalibration of Odisha’s infrastructure needs or a political reward for electoral loyalty is a question that only the next decade’s completion rates can answer. Money allocated is not money spent. Money spent is not infrastructure completed. And infrastructure completed in 2030 for a need that was identified in 1955 is a reminder that “catching up” is not the same as being treated fairly.

Paradip: The Port That Built Itself

If Odisha’s railway story is about what Delhi didn’t build, the Paradip Port story is about what Odisha built despite Delhi — and what happened when Delhi took it over.

Biju Patnaik, as Chief Minister in the early 1960s, initiated the construction of Paradip Port with state funds after failing to secure timely central government approval. The foundation stone was laid by Jawaharlal Nehru on January 3, 1962. But the actual construction — the dredging, the breakwater, the initial berths — was funded and managed by the state government, an extraordinary act of state-level initiative in an era when infrastructure was overwhelmingly a central subject.

The Government of India took over the management of the port from the Government of Odisha on June 1, 1965. The port received its first vessel — INS Investigator — on March 12, 1966, and was declared open the same day. On April 18, 1966, the Government of India declared Paradip the eighth Major Port of India, making it the first major port on the east coast commissioned after independence.

Now fast-forward six decades.

In FY 2024-25, Paradip Port handled 150.41 million metric tonnes of cargo, making it the number one port among all government-operated major ports in India for the second consecutive year. For the first time in the history of major ports, Paradip crossed the 150 MMT mark, alongside Deendayal Port (Kandla) in Gujarat. Paradip’s berth productivity — 34,283 metric tonnes per day per berth — is the highest among all major ports. Containerized cargo volumes surged by 111 percent year-on-year. Coastal cargo handling reached 63.71 MMT, accounting for 42.36 percent of total volume.

Paradip is, by the numbers, the most important government-operated port in India.

And the investment it receives does not reflect this status. In 2020, the central government approved a Rs 3,004.63 crore project to develop Paradip into a “mega port” — including a new Western Dock on a Build-Operate-Transfer basis (Rs 2,040 crore), capital dredging (Rs 352 crore), and common supporting infrastructure (Rs 612.50 crore).

Meanwhile, Deendayal Port in Kandla, Gujarat, has received a planned investment of Rs 57,000 crore. This includes a state-of-the-art Smart Port along a 6-kilometre waterfront adding 135 MMTPA of cargo capacity (Rs 27,000 crore), and a Mega Shipbuilding Marine Cluster spread over 8,000 acres (Rs 30,000 crore) capable of manufacturing Very Large Crude Carriers and producing 32 new ships and repairing 50 annually.

Read those numbers again. Kandla: Rs 57,000 crore. Paradip: Rs 3,000 crore. Both ports handle roughly 150 MMT of cargo. One receives nineteen times the planned investment of the other.

This is not to say the investment categories are identical — Kandla’s plan includes a shipbuilding cluster, which is a different kind of infrastructure from port capacity expansion. But the magnitude of the gap is instructive. Paradip has achieved its number-one ranking despite underinvestment, not because of it. It succeeded through operational efficiency — squeezing maximum throughput from existing infrastructure — while Kandla is being positioned for transformation through a capital injection that Paradip has never been offered.

There is a word for a system where one node consistently outperforms while receiving a fraction of the resources directed to its peers: exploitation. The revenue Paradip generates flows to the central exchequer (the port is under the central government’s Ports, Shipping and Waterways Ministry). The reinvestment in Paradip is determined by the same central government. The 19:1 investment gap between Kandla and Paradip is not explained by operational need. It is explained by political geography. Gujarat has 26 Lok Sabha seats, a history of high BJP prioritization, and a chief minister (Narendra Modi, 2001-2014) who became Prime Minister. Odisha has 21 seats and, until 2024, was governed by a regional party that supported the BJP in Parliament without formally joining the ruling coalition.

I would be wrong about this explanation if the Kandla-Paradip investment gap could be explained purely by commercial factors — different cargo mixes, different hinterland needs, different strategic priorities in international trade corridors. Some of the gap can be so explained: Kandla’s positioning on the International North-South Transport Corridor and the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor gives it a strategic significance that Paradip currently lacks. But the magnitude — nineteen times — cannot be explained by strategy alone.

Dhamra: The Port That Left

If Paradip illustrates central government underinvestment in a state-originated port, Dhamra illustrates a different pattern: the privatization of state-level infrastructure into corporate hands, with profits flowing away from the state of origin.

The Dhamra Port was conceived as a state-level initiative. The agreement to develop it was signed in April 1998, and the Dhamra Port Company Limited (DPCL) was formed as a 50:50 joint venture between Larsen & Toubro and Tata Steel. The Government of Odisha granted a concession under a Build-Own-Operate-Share-Transfer (BOOST) model for 34 years, including a 4-year construction period. The port, located in Bhadrak district on the Bay of Bengal, received its first vessel on February 8, 2010, and its first commercial vessel on April 10, 2011.

In May 2014, Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone entered an agreement with L&T and Tata Steel to acquire 100 percent of DPCL. The acquisition was completed in June 2014 for Rs 5,500 crore.

The transaction was private and legal. No law was broken. But its structural implications for Odisha are significant.

Dhamra Port now handles approximately 43-46 MMT of cargo annually, with a capacity expanded to 100 MMTPA under Adani’s ownership. The port’s cargo volumes, revenue, and profits flow through Adani Ports and SEZ’s consolidated financial statements. In Q3 FY24, Adani Ports’ consolidated net profit was Rs 2,208 crore on revenue of Rs 6,920 crore — across all its port assets, not just Dhamra. But Dhamra is a significant contributor.

What does Odisha get? Between FY 2011-12 and FY 2020-21, the Government of Odisha collected Rs 691.39 crore from Dhamra Port’s operations through concession-based revenue sharing — royalties, license fees, and waterfront charges. That is Rs 691 crore over ten years, from a port that handles over 40 MMT annually and is valued in the thousands of crores.

The BOOST model was designed to attract private investment into infrastructure that the state could not fund on its own. In this, it succeeded. But the model also ensures that the bulk of the value created by the port — profits, capital appreciation, strategic positioning in the national logistics network — accrues to the private operator, not to the state. Odisha provided the coastline, the regulatory permissions, the hinterland connectivity (such as it is), and the political environment that made the port possible. It receives, in return, a modest revenue share that is a fraction of the port’s economic value.

This is the privatization bargain as it plays out across India, and it is not unique to Odisha. But in a state that has seen its publicly owned resources systematically undervalued — minerals extracted at below-market royalties, coal mined by central companies at centrally determined rates — the privatization of a major port into hands that are structurally external to the state’s economy adds another channel through which value flows out.

Roads: The Missing Network

Railways and ports are the most visible infrastructure gaps, but the road network tells its own story.

Odisha’s national highway density, while improved significantly in recent years, historically lagged behind the national average. More critically, approximately 40 percent of villages in Odisha lacked all-weather road connectivity as recently as the early 2010s, compared to about 60 percent connectivity at the national level. The Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY), launched in 2000, has made significant progress — but the starting point was so low, and the terrain in western and southern Odisha so challenging, that the gap persists.

The road deficit compounds the railway deficit. In districts where the railway is absent or under construction, goods and people move by road. The mineral transport that should be on rail travels by truck, destroying state highways that the state government must repair. The famous Keonjhar-Jajpur road corridor, carrying iron ore from the Barbil-Joda mining belt to the ports, has been perpetually degraded by overloaded mining trucks — a direct consequence of insufficient rail connectivity in the mineral belt.

The cost of this is borne by the state exchequer, by the communities that live along the degraded roads, and by the road accident statistics that make Odisha’s mining districts among the most dangerous corridors in the country. Central legislation controls the minerals. Central railways are supposed to transport them. When the railways are decades behind schedule, the state bears the cost of the gap in both money and lives.

The Post-2024 Surge: Genuine Change or Catching Up?

The numbers since 2024 are real. Rs 10,586 crore for railways in 2024-25. Rs 10,599 crore in 2025-26. Rs 10,928 crore in 2026-27. The Rs 90,659 crore in announced railway projects. The East-West Dedicated Freight Corridor — a 2,052-kilometre line from Dankuni in West Bengal to Surat in Gujarat, announced in the Union Budget 2026 — runs through Odisha and will, if completed, transform the state’s freight logistics by allowing double-stack container trains and higher axle-load wagons.

A Rs 1,000-crore Bhubaneswar Metro Rail project has been budgeted. National highway development has been prioritized. Central clearances for industrial projects — environmental clearance, forest clearance, mining licenses — have reportedly accelerated under a state government ideologically aligned with the centre.

These are material changes. It would be dishonest to dismiss them as mere political optics.

But context matters. The twelve-and-a-half-fold increase in railway allocation — from Rs 838 crore average in 2009-14 to Rs 10,928 crore in 2026-27 — is a measure of how severely underinvested Odisha was, not of how generously it is now being treated. A ten-thousand-crore annual allocation for a state that generates over twenty-three thousand crore in railway revenue is still not proportional return on investment. It is a correction, not a premium.

And the East-West Dedicated Freight Corridor, while promising, is in the Revised Detailed Project Report phase. Previous dedicated freight corridors in India — the Eastern and Western DFCs, conceived in 2006 — took nearly two decades from concept to near-completion. If the Dankuni-Surat corridor follows a similar trajectory, it will be operational sometime in the 2040s. The economic transformation it promises is real but distant. The mineral freight that needs efficient transport is moving today, on underprovisioned lines, at speeds and volumes that the existing infrastructure struggles to support.

The broader question is whether the post-2024 investment surge is structural — a permanent recalibration of Odisha’s share of central infrastructure spending — or cyclical, tied to the BJP’s political calculus of rewarding a state that delivered 20 out of 21 Lok Sabha seats. If Odisha’s electoral landscape shifts in 2029 or 2034, will the allocations hold? Or will the state revert to the Rs 838-crore regime that prevailed when its votes were divided between the BJD and the BJP, and neither party needed Odisha urgently enough to invest in it?

The historical pattern suggests that Indian central governments invest in states whose electoral loyalty they need to maintain or whose electoral opposition they need to neutralize. Odisha’s infrastructure surge will prove to be a structural shift only if it persists through electoral cycles that do not favor the incumbent party. That test is years away.

The Deeper Pattern: Infrastructure as a Function of Political Power

Step back from the specifics and look at the underlying structure.

Odisha’s infrastructure deficit — in railways, in ports, in roads, in airports, in industrial corridors — is not primarily a story about technical difficulty, geographic challenge, or administrative incompetence. These factors exist and matter. The Eastern Ghats make railway construction expensive. Cyclone-prone coastal terrain complicates port and road infrastructure. Land acquisition in tribal areas is legally and ethically complex.

But these factors explain delays of years, not decades. They explain cost overruns, not the fundamental mismatch between revenue contribution and infrastructure investment. They do not explain why a state that contributes Rs 15,000 crore in railway revenue has a rail density 21 percent below the national average. They do not explain why India’s number one port by cargo volume receives one-nineteenth the planned investment of its nearest competitor in Gujarat. They do not explain why four major railway projects sanctioned in the 1990s remain incomplete in the mid-2020s.

The explanation is political, and it operates at a level that is uncomfortable to articulate because it implicates the structure of Indian democracy itself. Representative democracies allocate resources partly based on need, partly based on efficiency, and partly — in practice, heavily — based on political weight. States with more Lok Sabha seats get more attention not because their needs are greater but because their votes are more numerous. A Railway Minister calculating where to allocate marginal capital expenditure faces a choice between a project in Uttar Pradesh (80 seats) and a project in Odisha (21 seats). The political return on investment is unambiguous.

This is not a conspiracy. It is an incentive structure. And it is reinforced by the fact that Odisha’s political class, for most of its post-independence history, has not had the national leverage to demand better treatment. The BJD under Naveen Patnaik practiced equidistance — supporting the BJP in Parliament without joining the NDA — which preserved the state’s autonomy but limited its bargaining power. The Congress, when in power at the centre, treated Odisha with the indifference it reserved for states that were neither electorally decisive nor organizationally important to the party.

The result is what you see on the ground: a state that is essential to the national economy as a source of raw materials and freight revenue, but peripheral to the national political calculation that determines where infrastructure gets built.

The tracks that were never laid, the ports that were never invested in, the roads that were never widened — these are not the absence of policy. They are the presence of a policy that allocates national resources based on political power rather than economic rationality or developmental need. The missing infrastructure is the infrastructure of a permanent colony: efficient enough to extract resources and transport them to the metropole, insufficient to develop the colony itself.

Whether the post-2024 moment represents a break from this pattern or merely an intensification of the same logic — rewarding political loyalty rather than responding to developmental need — is the question that the next decade will answer. The tracks, if they are ever completed, will provide the answer in steel and concrete.

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Source Research

The raw research that informs this series.