English only · Odia translation in progress

Chapter 4: The Two Universities

Drive north from Vani Vihar Square in Bhubaneswar on a weekday morning in 2025, and within fifteen minutes you will encounter two versions of higher education that share a city but inhabit different centuries.

Turn left toward the Utkal University campus — the institution established in 1943, the oldest university in Odisha, the intellectual home of Harekrushna Mahtab and generations of Odia scholars, the place that was supposed to be the mind of the state. The main gate still carries its old grandeur, but the road inside tells a different story. The corridors of the Arts Block need paint. Several department offices are locked — not for the day but indefinitely, because there is no faculty to occupy them. The Department of Business Administration has ten vacancies. The Department of Psychology has ten vacancies. Out of 238 sanctioned teaching positions, 133 are unfilled. More than 55 percent of the chairs are empty. The library is open, but the researchers who would fill it are missing. The non-teaching staff is worse: 189 occupied positions out of 502 sanctioned. Utkal University is a building with a name and a history, being operated by roughly half the people it was designed to need.

The students are there, though. They arrive from the affiliated colleges and PG departments, taking notes from guest lecturers who earn Rs 20,000 to Rs 25,000 a month — roughly one-fourth of a permanent faculty member’s salary — often paid three to six months late. These guest lecturers teach, supervise dissertations, conduct examinations, and mentor students. They do the same work as permanent faculty. They receive no pension, no medical insurance, no research grants, no maternity leave. And they are the load-bearing wall of the entire system: 963 guest faculty members across six major state universities keep Odisha’s public higher education functioning.

Now drive back to Vani Vihar Square and turn east toward Patia. Within ten minutes you reach the campus of the Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology — KIIT. The first thing you notice is the scale. A 25-square-kilometer campus that did not exist in 1991. Buildings with glass facades. International students walking between blocks. Placement banners advertising median salaries of Rs 9.7 lakh per annum for engineering graduates. Nearly 40,000 students from across India and 65 countries. B.Tech programs accredited not only by NAAC (A grade, three consecutive times) but by IET (UK) and ABET (US) — international quality stamps that no public university in Odisha has ever pursued. Partnerships with over 190 universities across five continents. NIRF 2025 overall rank: 27th in India. Among universities: 17th.

The two campuses are separated by a fifteen-minute auto ride. The distance between them, measured in any dimension that matters — faculty, infrastructure, research output, placement outcomes, national recognition — is unbridgeable.

Here is the detail that makes the gap not merely large but structurally significant: of KIIT’s 14,064 undergraduate students in a recent year, only 103 were from Odisha. The remaining 12,910 came from other Indian states, with an additional 97 international students in engineering programs alone. KIIT is a nationally ranked institution headquartered in Bhubaneswar that serves, overwhelmingly, the children of families from other states. It has achieved what Utkal University never could — national brand recognition, a pan-Indian student body, placement records that rival the IITs — and it has done so in the same city, under the same political system, at the same time that Utkal University declined from the premier university of Odisha to an institution invisible in national rankings.

This is the two-university problem. Not two campuses. Two systems. Two Odishas of higher education, separated by a wall made not of brick but of money.

And to understand how one system died while the other was born, you need to think about forests.

Succession

Ecologists have a term for what happens when the canopy of an old-growth forest dies. The mature trees — the ones that defined the ecosystem for centuries, provided shade, regulated the understory, created the conditions for the species that lived beneath them — collapse. Disease, fire, drought, neglect, some combination. The canopy opens. Sunlight floods the forest floor.

What colonizes the gap is not more old-growth forest. What colonizes it are pioneer species — fast-growing, sun-loving, aggressively competitive organisms adapted not to the conditions of the old forest but to the new conditions created by its absence. Pioneer species are productive. They grow quickly. They cover the ground. From a distance, the forest looks alive again.

But the new ecosystem is structurally different from the one it replaced. Pioneer species serve different ecological functions. The old-growth canopy was biodiverse, slow-growing, deeply rooted, accessible to species that needed shade and moisture and the particular microclimate that centuries of accumulated growth had created. The pioneer forest is faster, more competitive, more efficiently organized, but it occupies a narrower ecological niche. It serves different organisms. It is adapted to different conditions.

Odisha’s higher education system has undergone exactly this succession. The public universities — Utkal, Ravenshaw, Sambalpur, Berhampur — were the canopy. They were slow-growing, deeply rooted, accessible to anyone who could reach them. A first-generation college student from a small town in Mayurbhanj or a village in Ganjam could enroll at Ravenshaw or Utkal with fees measured in hundreds of rupees, not lakhs. The canopy provided shade — perhaps not world-class shade, but shade that reached the forest floor. The pioneer species that colonized the gap — KIIT, SOA, XIM, C.V. Raman — are productive, nationally competitive, and efficient. They serve the upper-middle-class engineering aspirant from Ranchi and Raipur and Kolkata, the student whose family can invest Rs 18.5 lakh for a four-year B.Tech.

The succession has occurred. The new ecosystem is measurably more productive by certain metrics — NIRF rankings, placement rates, international partnerships. But the ecological niche that the old-growth canopy filled — affordable, accessible, democratic higher education for the first-generation learner from the bottom half of the income distribution — remains empty. No pioneer species has colonized that gap, because there is no economic incentive to serve a population that cannot pay.

This is not a failure of the private institutions. Pioneer species do not fail by being pioneer species. They colonize the niche they are adapted for. The failure is in whatever killed the canopy.

How the Canopy Died

The decline of Odisha’s public universities did not happen overnight, and it did not happen for a single reason. It was a cascade — each problem creating the conditions for the next, each failure compounding into the one that followed. The metaphor from ecology holds: canopy trees do not usually die from one cause. They die from a combination of stresses that individually would be survivable but collectively overwhelm the system’s capacity to recover.

The vacancy plague. Start with the numbers because the numbers are the skeleton. Across seventeen state-run universities in Odisha, 1,404 teaching posts lie vacant. This represents roughly 60 to 70 percent of all sanctioned positions. At Utkal University, the figure is 55 percent. At Ravenshaw University — founded in 1868, the oldest institution of higher education in Odisha — the vacancy rate tops the charts. Between 2017 and 2024, less than 12 percent of faculty vacancies in state universities were permanently filled. The rest were outsourced to guest faculty.

The last major hiring drive took place almost five years ago under the BJD government. Recruitment has been stalled through a combination that is by now familiar to anyone who has studied Indian public institutions: bureaucratic inertia, legal challenges to appointment processes, political calculation about who controls which positions, and the structural fact that temporary appointments are easier to control politically than permanent ones. A guest lecturer who earns Rs 20,000 a month with no contract security does not challenge the Vice-Chancellor. A tenured professor might.

In 2025, the new BJP state government initiated a process to fill 1,353 faculty positions under the Odisha University (Amendment) Act, 2024. Whether this process will complete before the next election cycle remains uncertain. I assign roughly 50 percent confidence that these positions will be substantially filled within three years — the history of faculty recruitment in Odisha provides no basis for optimism, though the new act’s provision for university-level hiring committees (bypassing the notoriously slow OPSC) is a genuine structural improvement.

[~50% confidence: that the 1,353 vacancies will be substantially filled within three years. This would be wrong if the new recruitment process gets mired in litigation, committee formation delays, or political interference — all of which have precedent.]

The Vice-Chancellor problem. In a well-functioning university system, the Vice-Chancellor is a scholar who provides academic leadership. In Odisha’s public university system, the Vice-Chancellor position has been a political prize. A controversial 2020 Odisha University (Amendment) Act gave the state government direct power over VC appointments, bypassing UGC norms. The Supreme Court stayed it. For three years afterward, thirteen VC positions remained vacant or held by acting appointees. The 2024 amendment replaced the old system with a three-member committee of educationists — an improvement in design, though the real test is whether the committee’s recommendations will be followed or whether the old pattern of political appointment with academic cosmetics will reassert itself.

The cascading effect of politicized VC appointments is not obvious until you trace it through the system. A politically appointed VC does not hire the best faculty — they hire the most convenient. They do not reform the curriculum — they maintain the status quo that maintains their position. They do not challenge the student union leaders who disrupt campus — they accommodate them, because those leaders have the same political patrons. Each bad appointment makes the next one more likely, because the people who would object — strong faculty, assertive academic councils, engaged student bodies — have either left or been replaced by those who will not object.

The examination disease. Within a fourteen-month period, Odisha witnessed thirteen cases of question paper leaks across various examinations. The OTET-2025 — a teacher eligibility test affecting 75,000 applicants — was postponed after the Vice Chairman of the Board of Secondary Education’s own laptop was identified as the source of the leak. At Barpali College in Bargarh, twelve people were arrested, including ten students, for leaking Plus 3 examination papers. The Council of Higher Secondary Education responded with thirteen security measures including GPS-tracked question paper transportation — a technological fix for what is fundamentally an institutional integrity failure.

Paper leaks are not random criminal events. They are symptoms of a system where examination administration is the primary function of universities — the thing they spend most of their administrative energy on — and yet even that primary function has been compromised. When the affiliating model requires a single university to set, print, distribute, administer, and grade examinations for 200 to 300 colleges, the surface area for corruption is immense. Each examination cycle is a logistical operation involving thousands of staff, hundreds of sites, and millions of rupees. The incentive structure guarantees leaks: the stakes for students are high (their degrees depend on it), the pay for examination staff is low (many are guest faculty earning Rs 20,000 a month), the oversight is minimal (who watches the watchers in a system running at half capacity?), and the penalties for getting caught are not severe enough to deter.

The campus as battleground. Student union elections at Odisha’s public universities regularly produce violence. At Utkal University, clashes between ABVP and Yuva Morcha factions — both affiliated with the same ruling political party — left two students seriously injured ahead of student union polls. Students subsequently protested outside the Vice-Chancellor’s office, demanding measures against “non-student interference.” That phrase is the tell: many participants in student union politics at Odisha’s universities are not students at all. They are political operatives using campuses as staging grounds for party-level factional battles.

The contrast with private institutions is instructive. KIIT, SOA, and XIM have virtually no disruptive student politics. This is partly because private institutions exercise tighter administrative control, and partly because students paying Rs 4 to 18 lakh per year have a different calculation about disrupting their own education. The result: students at public universities experience intermittent chaos — classes disrupted, examination schedules derailed, genuine students caught in the crossfire — while students at private institutions experience uninterrupted academic calendars. This difference alone, independent of faculty quality or infrastructure, drives families toward private options when they can afford them.

The funding starvation. Odisha allocated Rs 35,536 crore for the education sector in 2024-25, but this figure conceals more than it reveals. The vast majority goes to school and mass education. Higher education receives a fraction, and within that fraction, 71 percent goes to salary payments. Capital expenditure on laboratories, libraries, digital infrastructure, and research equipment is negligible at most state universities. The state allocated 13.4 percent of total expenditure toward education — lower than the average state allocation of 14.7 percent. Analysis indicates Odisha needs to increase education spending by 2.28 percentage points of GSDP to meet adequate funding standards.

The funding starvation is not merely about money. It is about what the money signals. When a state government allocates a hundred crore rupees to a single technical university (OUTR, formerly CET Bhubaneswar) as an exception while leaving five hundred crore in vacancies unfilled across the system, the message to every participant in the system — faculty, students, administrators — is clear: public higher education is not a priority. The political economy makes this legible. Elections in Odisha are won on welfare transfers — KALIA, BSKY, Subhadra Yojana — not on promises to fix Utkal University. No candidate has ever won a constituency by pledging to fill faculty vacancies. The extraction equilibrium that The Long Arc documented — extract minerals, fund welfare, win votes, repeat — has no role for higher education. The universities sit outside the feedback loop that drives political investment.

The infrastructure rot. At the Odisha University of Technology and Research, student reviews describe “buildings not maintained, old plaster coming out, the main gate missing for 3 years.” At the Central University of Odisha in Koraput — a centrally-funded institution — there are “only three small academic blocks.” This is the pattern: intermittent investment in laboratory equipment (often tied to specific grants) coupled with chronic neglect of physical infrastructure — hostels, roads, common areas, sanitation. The contrast with private campuses in the same city is visible to every student who visits both.

Each of these stresses — vacancies, politicized appointments, examination fraud, campus violence, funding starvation, infrastructure decay — is survivable individually. Together, they form a cascade. Vacancies lead to reliance on guest faculty, which leads to poor research output, which leads to falling rankings, which leads to declining student interest, which leads to lower political pressure to reform, which leads to further neglect. The cascade is self-reinforcing. The canopy dies not from a single blow but from accumulated weight.

The Pioneer Species

While the canopy was dying, something remarkable was growing in the gap.

In 1992, Achyuta Samanta — a man from the Cuttack district who had lost his father at age four and grown up in extreme poverty — established a vocational institute in two rented houses in Bhubaneswar with twelve students, two faculty members, and Rs 5,000 in capital. He called it the Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology.

The trajectory from that point is one of the most dramatic institutional transformations in Indian higher education. By 1997, KIIT had transitioned to degree-granting programs. By 2004, it was a deemed university. By 2015, the Ministry of Human Resource Development classified it as a Category A university. By 2018, the UGC granted it “graded autonomy” as one of sixty “better performing” universities in India. By 2025, it was ranked 27th overall nationally by NIRF and 17th among universities.

The numbers are worth pausing on. 40,000 students. 65 countries represented. 34 undergraduate programs, 32 postgraduate, 10 integrated, 11 PhD. B.Tech programs accredited by IET (UK) and ABET (US). Partnerships with 190 universities across five continents. Placement rate for the 2024-25 B.Tech batch: 97.3 percent — 3,513 out of 3,611 graduates placed. Median salary: Rs 9.7 lakh per annum. Recruiters: Google, Reliance, D.E. Shaw, Oracle.

Pioneer species grow fast. That is their defining trait — they are adapted to exploit the conditions that the canopy’s absence creates. Sunlight floods the forest floor, and the pioneer species’ entire biology is optimized to capture it. KIIT captured the demand that Odisha’s public universities could not serve: the demand for an engineering degree with national recognition, competitive placement, and a functioning campus. It did not need to compete with Utkal University for the same students. It competed with NITs and lower-ranked IITs for students from other states — and won.

The KIIT story has a parallel. Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan — SOA — began in 1997 as the Institute of Technical Education and Research (ITER), initially affiliated to Utkal University, then to Biju Patnaik University of Technology. By 2007 it was a deemed university. By 2025, SOA held the highest NAAC rating in all of Odisha: A++ with a CGPA of 3.88 out of 4.00. NIRF ranked it 25th overall nationally — higher than KIIT. Its dental school is ranked 10th in India. Its medical science programs are ranked 18th. SOA has approximately 17,300 students and 1,317 faculty members.

The irony is structural. SOA was born inside Utkal University’s affiliating system. It incubated within the canopy, using the canopy’s accreditation infrastructure, and then outgrew it. The child surpassed the parent. ITER’s trajectory — from an affiliated college to a deemed university ranked higher than any public institution in the state — is the succession metaphor made institutional. The pioneer species did not arrive from outside. It germinated in the gap between what the canopy promised and what it delivered.

XIM University represents a different variant: Jesuit-founded management education that has maintained quality for nearly four decades. Its 2025 MBA placements achieved 100 percent placement with an average package of Rs 18.25 lakh per annum and a highest offer of Rs 32.80 lakh. Microsoft, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Deloitte — the recruiter list reads like a top-twenty business school anywhere in India. And yet XIM, like every other quality institution in the state, is a pipeline: virtually all its graduates leave Odisha for employment.

The second tier of private institutions — C.V. Raman Global University (NIRF 96th in engineering, 2024), Silicon University, and dozens of smaller colleges — collectively enroll tens of thousands of students. Their quality varies enormously, but the top performers produce placement outcomes comparable to or better than public universities.

And then there is KISS — the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences, established alongside KIIT in 1993, which became a deemed-to-be university in 2017. KISS defies every category in this analysis. It is the only university in the world exclusively for indigenous scholars. Thirty-seven thousand total tribal students — 27,000 currently enrolled, more than 10,000 alumni — receiving fully free residential education. Students from all 62 recognized tribes of Odisha, including PVTGs. Sixty percent girls. The entire education — tuition, hostel, food, clothing — provided at zero cost.

KISS is what happens when a pioneer species deliberately tries to fill the niche that the canopy left empty. It is not profitable. It is not scalable through the market. It exists because Achyuta Samanta decided it should exist. That decision produced an institution that takes children from some of India’s most marginalized communities — children who would otherwise have no access to higher education — and produces graduates competitive in the modern economy while maintaining connections to their tribal identity.

But one institution, however extraordinary, cannot substitute for a functioning public system. The ecological point is precise: KISS is an intervention, not an ecosystem. It fills a specific gap for a specific population. The broader niche — affordable, accessible higher education for the general population of first-generation learners — remains empty.

The Price Tag of the Two Systems

The fee comparison between Odisha’s public and private systems is not a data point. It is a class boundary.

At a public university, an undergraduate arts or science degree costs Rs 357 to Rs 5,000 per year. Total program cost over three years: Rs 1,500 to Rs 20,000. A government engineering college charges Rs 30,000 to Rs 2.5 lakh per year, with a total four-year cost of Rs 1.17 to 9.96 lakh. A government MBBS seat costs Rs 5,000 to Rs 50,000 per year — total for the full program: roughly Rs 2 to 3 lakh.

At KIIT, a B.Tech costs Rs 4.6 lakh per year, totaling Rs 18.5 lakh for four years. At SOA, engineering programs run Rs 3 to 5 lakh per year. At KIMS, the private medical college under the KIIT umbrella, an MBBS costs Rs 18.5 lakh per year — total: approximately Rs 83.5 lakh. The NRI fee at KIMS is Rs 40 lakh per year.

The ratio between the cheapest public option and the most expensive private one is roughly 1 to 5,500 for undergraduate education and 1 to 400 for medical education. These are not different price points within the same market. They are different markets. A family in Nuapada district whose annual income is Rs 1.5 lakh can afford the public university. They cannot afford KIIT. A family in Bhubaneswar whose combined income is Rs 12 lakh can stretch for KIIT but cannot afford KIMS. A family earning Rs 25 lakh can consider private medical education. These are different Odishas.

The two-tier structure creates a paradox that ecologists would recognize. The pioneer species are thriving — KIIT rank 27, SOA rank 25, placement rates above 97 percent. But they serve a narrow band of the population: families that can mobilize Rs 15 to 85 lakh for a child’s education. Meanwhile, the majority of students — those from families in the bottom 60 to 70 percent of income distribution — attend public institutions with 55 percent faculty vacancies, no national ranking, 42 percent graduate employability (below the national average), and examination systems compromised by paper leaks.

The pioneer forest is productive. The old-growth niche is empty. The organisms that depended on the canopy — the first-generation learner from a small town, the Dalit student whose family never produced a graduate, the tribal youth who made it through the school system — have no equivalent habitat.

The Enclaves

There is a third category of institution in Odisha that does not fit neatly into the public-private binary. The national institutions — IIT Bhubaneswar, NIT Rourkela, AIIMS Bhubaneswar, NISER, IIM Sambalpur, IISER Berhampur, the Central University of Odisha in Koraput, the National Law University in Cuttack — are centrally funded, nationally administered, and operationally disconnected from the state’s higher education ecosystem. They function as enclaves.

The term is deliberate. An enclave, in geography, is a territory entirely surrounded by another territory but governed by a different authority. Odisha’s national institutions are physically located in the state but governed from Delhi, funded from Delhi, and oriented toward national objectives rather than state development. They are excellent — some of them genuinely world-class — and they are nearly irrelevant to the structural problems of Odisha’s higher education system.

Consider NIT Rourkela — one of the original seventeen Regional Engineering Colleges, established in 1961, upgraded to NIT in 2002. It is consistently the highest-ranked engineering institution in Odisha: NIRF rank 34 overall, rank 19 in engineering. Its 2024-25 placement data: 1,274 job offers, 509 six-month internships, B.Tech placement rate of 82 percent, highest package Rs 62.44 lakh per annum, average B.Tech salary Rs 14.10 lakh. Three hundred and seventy-three recruiters participated, including Google, Amazon, Qualcomm, AMD, Texas Instruments.

NIT Rourkela has been producing graduates for sixty-four years. An estimated 90 percent or more leave the state for employment. The institute produces world-class talent, but Odisha’s economy has no mechanism to absorb it. A CSE graduate with an offer of Rs 20 to 60 lakh from a Bangalore tech firm has no employer in Odisha offering comparable compensation. The pipeline problem documented in The Leaving is not NIT Rourkela’s fault. It is a structural consequence of an economy that lacks the employers, research parks, and innovation ecosystems that would make staying rational.

IIT Bhubaneswar, established in 2008 as part of the second wave of IITs, shows the same pattern: 90 percent B.Tech placement rate, highest domestic CTC of Rs 67.6 lakh, top recruiters including Google and D.E. Shaw — and virtually all placed students leaving the state.

AIIMS Bhubaneswar, ranked 15th among medical institutions nationally and 3rd among AIIMS campuses (after Delhi and Rishikesh), trains doctors who overwhelmingly pursue super-specialization or careers elsewhere. NISER, the Department of Atomic Energy’s research institute at Jatani, produces integrated MSc graduates in pure sciences who typically proceed to doctoral programs at IISc, IITs, or foreign universities. IIM Sambalpur — which achieved a remarkable 16-rank jump to 34th in NIRF management rankings in 2025 and placed 100 percent of its 314-student batch at an average of Rs 15.65 lakh — sends graduates to consulting firms and banks headquartered in Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi. No consulting firm has an Odisha office. No investment bank has a branch in Sambalpur.

IISER Berhampur and the Central University of Odisha in Koraput face an additional problem: their locations in smaller cities with limited urban infrastructure make faculty recruitment and student attraction more difficult. The Central University, placed in one of Odisha’s most underdeveloped districts as a development anchor, has itself struggled with the very challenges it was meant to address — “only three small academic blocks,” limited faculty, thin research culture.

The pipeline problem compounds over generations. When NIT Rourkela alumni from the 1970s through 1990s are scattered across India and the world, they do not return to build companies in Odisha. They build companies in Bangalore, Pune, and Silicon Valley. Their success raises Odisha’s pride but not its economic capacity. Each cohort that leaves makes it harder for the next cohort to stay, because the ecosystem of mentors, investors, and peer entrepreneurs remains thin. As The Long Arc documented, the institution-building impulse compounded, but the brain drain compounded alongside it.

The ecological metaphor applies here too, but differently. The national institutions are not pioneer species and they are not canopy trees. They are transplants — specimens from a different ecosystem, placed in Odisha’s soil but drawing their nutrients from Delhi’s funding streams. They grow independently of the surrounding forest. Their roots do not connect to the local mycelial network. They produce excellent fruit, but the fruit is harvested by organisms from other ecosystems. In ecological terms, they are ornamental plantings — impressive, well-maintained, and contributing nothing to the regeneration of the surrounding forest.

This is not a criticism of these institutions. IIT Bhubaneswar did not choose to be disconnected from Odisha’s economy; it was placed in an economy that has nothing to offer its graduates. IIM Sambalpur did not choose to send all its graduates out of state; there are no management consulting firms, private equity funds, or fintech companies in Sambalpur that could employ them. The national institutions are performing exactly as designed: producing talent for India. The design simply does not include producing human capital for Odisha.

The Research Desert

If the canopy’s death is measured by faculty vacancies and NIRF absence, the deeper consequence is visible in a dimension that does not make headlines: research.

A scientometric study of three state government universities — Utkal, Sambalpur, and Berhampur — based on Scopus data from 2006 to 2015 found that even Utkal’s publication output was modest by national standards. None of the state’s public universities appear in any significant national research ranking. This is not a recent development. It is the predictable consequence of a system where 60 to 70 percent of faculty positions are held by guest lecturers earning a quarter of the regular salary with no job security, no research funding, no institutional incentive, and no time. A guest lecturer teaching a full course load for Rs 20,000 a month with payment delays of six months is not going to write a research paper. They are going to survive.

The contrast with private institutions is instructive. SOA is ranked 45th in NIRF Research (2024). KIIT is ranked 43rd in Research (2025). Both institutions invest deliberately in hiring faculty with active research profiles and creating incentive structures that reward publications and grants. This is a conscious strategic choice — research rankings improve NIRF scores, which improve student attraction, which generates tuition revenue. The market incentive works. The public institutions have no equivalent incentive: their students come regardless of research output (because they cannot afford alternatives), and their funding does not depend on publications (it comes from the state budget, which is determined by political, not academic, considerations).

The university-industry research linkage that drives innovation in comparator states is virtually non-existent in Odisha. No state university has a research park. No university has a significant corporate-sponsored chair program. Consider what exists elsewhere:

IIT Madras Research Park in Chennai: 400 startups incubated over eleven years, total valuation Rs 50,000 crore (roughly $6 billion), 80 percent startup survival rate (against a typical 8 to 10 percent), and 60 percent of founders are non-IITians — meaning the research park has become an ecosystem anchor for the entire city, not just the parent institution. T-Hub in Hyderabad is a public-private partnership anchored by IIIT-Hyderabad, ISB, and NALSAR, with a dedicated 70,000-square-foot building that anchors the city’s entire startup ecosystem. IISc Bangalore’s Foundation for Science, Innovation and Development incubates deep-science startups.

Odisha has the Odisha Startup Hub (O-Hub), which has attracted Rs 370 crore in external investments, launched a Rs 100 crore Fund of Funds with SIDBI, and seed-funded 140 startups. This is not nothing — it is a genuine effort. But O-Hub is a government initiative, not a university-led research ecosystem. The connection between university research and startup creation remains thin. Even KIIT and SOA, despite their high research rankings, function primarily as teaching institutions rather than research-to-startup pipelines.

The research deficit has a compounding effect that mirrors the brain drain. When a state’s universities do not produce research, the state does not attract research-dependent industries. When research-dependent industries are absent, talented researchers do not stay. When talented researchers leave, the universities produce even less research. The cycle is self-reinforcing, and it has been running for decades. Karnataka’s IT ecosystem was built on the research culture of IISc and IIT Bangalore. Tamil Nadu’s manufacturing depth was built on the engineering research culture of Anna University and IIT Madras. Odisha has the minerals, the location, the industrial base in steel and aluminium — sectors that desperately need applied research in green hydrogen, carbon capture, value-added materials, and process optimization. But the bridge between the university and the factory floor was never built.

[~65% confidence: that Odisha’s research deficit is a binding constraint on industrial upgrading. This would be wrong if industrial investment is driven primarily by factors independent of local research capacity — logistics, policy, raw material access — making university research less material than this analysis assumes.]

The GER Question

The Gross Enrollment Ratio — the percentage of youth aged 18 to 23 enrolled in higher education — is the single number that compresses all of the above into a verdict.

Odisha’s GER in 2021-22: 22.1 percent. The national average: 28.4 percent. The gap is 6.3 percentage points, which sounds small until you calculate what it represents in human terms. Odisha has approximately 45 to 50 lakh youth in the 18-to-23 age bracket. The 6.3-point gap means roughly 3 lakh additional young people who are not in higher education compared to what the national average would predict. These are not abstract statistics. They are sons and daughters of farming families in Kalahandi, fishing families in Balasore, tribal families in Mayurbhanj, who finished school — maybe — and then entered the labor market or the migration stream without the credential or the skill that higher education was supposed to provide.

NEP 2020 sets a target of 50 percent GER by 2035. For Odisha, this would require roughly doubling current enrollment. There is a striking paradox in the data: enrollment per college has been declining — from 680 students on average to 573 — even as the number of institutions has grown. The system is simultaneously expanding its institutional footprint and becoming less utilized. New colleges are being opened, often for political reasons (a college in every constituency is a patronage decision, not an educational one), while existing colleges lose students.

This is rational behavior from the student’s perspective. As the perceived quality of public institutions declines, students who can afford alternatives choose private institutions or migrate to other states for education. Students who cannot afford alternatives may skip higher education entirely, entering the labor force or the migration stream directly after Class 12. The GER decline in public institutions is not a puzzle — it is the market response to a product whose quality has fallen below the reservation price of its consumers.

The gender dimension compounds the access problem. Odisha’s Gender Parity Index in higher education is 0.88 — 88 women enrolled for every 100 men. The national GPI is approximately 1.01; women have actually overtaken men in higher education enrollment nationally. Odisha’s gap is particularly acute in professional courses — engineering and medicine — where female enrollment remains significantly below male enrollment. The structural barriers are familiar from Women’s Odisha: early marriage, domestic labor expectations, safety concerns around sending daughters to distant campuses, and the gendered calculation that investing in a daughter’s education yields lower returns to the natal family than investing in a son’s.

The SC/ST access crisis is the sharpest edge of the GER problem. Odisha has the third-highest Scheduled Tribe population in India at 22.8 percent. The national GER for Scheduled Tribes at last comprehensive measurement was only 6.6 percent — against an overall national average of 28.4 percent. The state has built significant infrastructure for SC/ST educational access: 422 Boys High Schools, 173 Girls High Schools, 62 Higher Secondary Schools, 705 Ashram Schools, 501 Sevashrams, 104 Eklavya Model Residential Schools, 19 PVTG Educational Complexes, the AKANSHYA urban hostel scheme, and post-matric scholarships. The pipeline from school to higher education, however, remains a cliff. Students arriving at university from under-resourced schools in tribal districts face an academic preparedness gap that no hostel or scholarship can bridge alone.

The Leaving documented where these young people end up: Surat’s power looms, Hyderabad’s construction sites, Kerala’s seafood processing plants. The GER gap is not merely an education statistic. It is a measurement of how many young Odias enter the labor market as unskilled or semi-skilled workers instead of as professionals, technicians, or knowledge workers. Each percentage point of GER below the national average represents a cohort that will earn less, migrate more, return less, and contribute less to the state’s economic transformation over their working lifetime.

The district-level variation makes the aggregate look gentle. Bhubaneswar and Cuttack concentrate the state capital, the major universities, the IT sector (such as it is), the best hospitals, and the preponderance of IAS officers. The KBK districts — Koraput, Bolangir, Kalahandi, Nuapada, Malkangiri, Nabarangpur, Rayagada, Sonepur — and the tribal-majority districts have the lowest density of quality higher education institutions. The Central University of Odisha in Koraput was supposed to anchor development in the state’s most disadvantaged region. Its three small academic blocks suggest how far that ambition has come.

The geographic concentration creates a self-reinforcing cycle that Urbanization Odisha documented from the urban side: quality institutions cluster in Bhubaneswar because faculty want to live where infrastructure exists, where schools for their children are available, where the airport is accessible. Students from remote districts who want quality education must migrate to Bhubaneswar, which breaks their connection to their home district. Those who succeed then migrate further — to Bangalore or Delhi — for employment. The districts that most need educated professionals are the ones least likely to retain them.

The Tamil Nadu Comparison

A comparison with a state that got this right — or at least less wrong — makes the structural gap concrete.

Tamil Nadu’s GER is approximately 47 percent. Odisha’s is 22 to 28 percent. Tamil Nadu has 526 engineering colleges (the highest in India) and 35 institutions in the NIRF top 100 colleges (the largest state share). Its state education policy — the first Indian state to introduce a comprehensive alternative to NEP 2020 — integrates vocational education with industry internships through the Naan Mudhalvan program. Its Gender Parity Index approaches 1.0. It uses the Educational Management Information System for disaggregated data, annual surveys, and third-party evaluations. Eight of fifteen Odisha universities have never even submitted themselves for NAAC accreditation.

The difference is not primarily about money, though Tamil Nadu does spend more. The difference is about feedback loops. Tamil Nadu’s political economy created a positive cycle: education investment produced skilled workers, which attracted employers (the auto industry in Chennai, the IT industry in the corridor from Chennai to Coimbatore), which created jobs that required education, which justified further education investment, which produced the next generation of skilled workers. Both the DMK and the AIADMK competed on education quality for decades. Dravidian politics made education a central campaign promise. No election in Tamil Nadu was contested without each party claiming it would build more colleges, hire more teachers, produce more engineers.

Odisha’s political economy runs a different feedback loop. Mineral extraction generates revenue, which funds welfare transfers (KALIA, BSKY, Subhadra Yojana), which generate votes, which sustain the extraction model. Higher education sits outside this loop. No election in Odisha has been fought on the promise of “we will fix Utkal University.” The 2024 election that brought the BJP to power was fought on anti-incumbency and welfare promises, not education reform.

This is the binding constraint, and it is not an accident. It is a rational consequence of the political economy. A politician who invests Rs 1,000 crore in faculty hiring at public universities produces a benefit (better education) that takes five to ten years to materialize, accrues to a relatively small number of students, and is difficult to claim credit for because education quality is hard to measure and attribute. A politician who invests Rs 1,000 crore in direct benefit transfers produces a visible, immediate, attributable benefit to millions of voters. The electoral math is overwhelming. Higher education loses the allocation competition not because politicians are ignorant of its importance but because the time horizon and attribution structure of education investment are misaligned with the electoral cycle.

Tamil Nadu solved this by making education a cultural priority that preceded any particular government. The Dravidian movement’s self-respect politics elevated education as the mechanism for social mobility, which made educational quality a metric that voters cared about, which made it electorally costly for any government to neglect. Odisha has no equivalent cultural consensus about higher education. The consciousness shift that The Churning Fire described — from “we are a state that was denied” to “we are a state that has not yet built” — has not yet reached higher education as a domain. The vocabulary exists for cyclone preparedness (OSDMA), for welfare delivery (KALIA, BSKY), for mining governance (DMF). It does not exist for universities.

The SEARCH Experiment

Against this background of structural decline, one experiment stands out as potentially transformative: the SEARCH cluster in Sambalpur — India’s first-ever academic cluster.

SEARCH — the Sambalpur Educational and Research Cluster Harbour — brings together seven institutions: VSSUT Burla (engineering), VIMSAR Burla (medical), IIM Sambalpur (management), Gangadhar Meher University (general), OUAT Chiplima (agriculture), and others. The design: institutions operate under a unified academic framework where students enrolled in one institution can pursue courses at any other member institution. A management student at IIM Sambalpur could take a course in agricultural economics at OUAT. An engineering student at VSSUT could take an elective in public health at VIMSAR.

The significance is structural. The multidisciplinary university model that NEP 2020 envisions does not require building new mega-universities from scratch. It can be achieved by networking existing institutions that are geographically proximate. The presence of IIM Sambalpur — a nationally ranked institution with 100 percent placement — alongside a government medical college and a state university creates the potential for genuine cross-disciplinary learning. This is the SEARCH cluster’s promise.

Its risk is bureaucratic. IIM Sambalpur reports to the Ministry of Education in Delhi. VIMSAR reports to the Odisha Health Department. Gangadhar Meher University reports to the Odisha Higher Education Department. OUAT reports to the Agriculture Department. Four different bureaucratic hierarchies, each with its own governance logic, incentive structure, and administrative culture. Getting them to cooperate on a shared academic framework is the implementation challenge that will determine whether SEARCH succeeds or becomes another announcement.

The ecological metaphor here is symbiosis — different species in the same habitat developing mutualistic relationships that benefit all of them. In a natural forest, mycorrhizal networks connect trees underground, allowing them to share nutrients and information. The SEARCH cluster is an attempt to build an institutional mycorrhizal network in an environment where each institution has been growing in isolation.

If the cluster model works in Sambalpur, it could be replicated in the Bhubaneswar-Cuttack corridor (where far more institutions are concentrated — IIT, AIIMS, NISER, Utkal University, Ravenshaw, SOA, KIIT, the law university) and in Berhampur (where IISER and the university coexist). If it fails — absorbed by bureaucratic friction, undermined by institutional jealousy, sabotaged by the incompatible governance structures of central and state institutions — then NEP 2020’s vision of multidisciplinary education in Odisha will remain a policy document.

[~40% confidence: that SEARCH will achieve meaningful cross-institutional integration within five years. This would be wrong if the bureaucratic barriers prove lower than expected, if IIM Sambalpur’s institutional energy drives cooperation faster than the governance structure would normally permit. I assign only 40 percent because the history of inter-institutional coordination in Indian higher education provides almost no success stories to extrapolate from.]

The Odisha University (Amendment) Act, 2024 — which allows universities to form their own recruitment committees, reformed VC selection through independent expert panels, restored the Senate as a governance body, and initiated the filling of 1,353 vacant faculty positions — represents the other structural reform that could matter. Its provisions are well-designed. The question, as always in Odisha, is not whether the law is good but whether the system will allow it to function as designed.

The NEP 2020 Contradiction

The implementation of NEP 2020 in Odisha’s government universities commenced in the 2024-25 academic year. The key changes are significant on paper: four-year undergraduate programs with multiple exit points (certificate after one year, diploma after two, degree after three, honours after four), choice-based credit systems, multidisciplinary course offerings (40 primary subjects, 112 multidisciplinary courses, 14 vocational courses, 56 value-based courses, 84 skill development programs approved), and the ability to complete a degree within seven years through multiple entry and exit.

The contradiction is structural and it is not subtle. NEP 2020 requires multidisciplinary universities with strong faculty across disciplines. Implementing a multidisciplinary curriculum in universities where 55 percent of faculty positions are vacant is an impossibility dressed as a reform. You cannot offer a course in data analytics if the statistics department has no permanent faculty. You cannot offer cross-disciplinary electives when departments cannot cover their own core syllabi. You cannot implement a credit-transfer system when examination administration is already overwhelmed by the affiliating model’s demands.

NEP 2020 in Odisha’s public universities risks becoming what many education reforms in India become: a framework that exists on paper, in official reports, and in minister’s speeches, while the reality in classrooms remains unchanged. The policy is excellent. The institutions it must be implemented in are hollowed out. The distance between the policy’s ambition and the system’s capacity is the distance between a blueprint and a building site that has no workers, no materials, and a foundation cracked by decades of neglect.

The Empty Niche

Return to the succession metaphor one final time.

In a natural ecosystem, after the pioneer species colonize the gap left by the canopy’s death, succession continues. Over decades and centuries, the pioneers are gradually replaced by slower-growing, deeper-rooted species that eventually reconstruct something resembling the original canopy — not identical to it, but serving similar ecological functions. The forest regenerates. The understory species that depend on shade find it again. The system recovers its complexity.

This secondary succession requires specific conditions. The soil must retain its nutrients. The seed bank must still contain the genetic material of the canopy species. The disturbance that killed the original canopy must not recur, or must recur at a frequency that allows recovery between events. If the soil is stripped, if the seeds are lost, if the disturbance is continuous, the pioneer species remain dominant indefinitely — or the system degrades further into scrubland or bare ground.

Odisha’s higher education ecosystem is at exactly this threshold. The question is not whether pioneer species (private institutions) will continue to grow — they will, because the market incentives are strong. The question is whether the conditions for secondary succession exist. Can the public university system regenerate?

The conditions for regeneration would include: filling the 1,353 vacant faculty positions with competent, research-active scholars (not politically appointed placeholders); implementing the VC reform genuinely (expert-selected academic leaders, not politicians in academic robes); breaking the affiliating model (converting the best colleges to autonomous institutions that set their own curricula); building university-industry linkages (especially in the sectors where Odisha has industrial mass — steel, aluminium, mining, energy); and creating the political consensus that Tamil Nadu built over decades — that higher education is infrastructure, not patronage.

The conditions against regeneration are: the political economy that prioritizes welfare transfers over institutional investment; the brain drain that removes the most capable potential faculty from the state; the examination culture that treats universities as degree-granting bureaucracies rather than sites of learning; and the cumulative effect of thirty years of decline, which has degraded the institutional memory and cultural expectations of what a public university should be.

A generation of Odia students has now grown up knowing Utkal University not as the intellectual heart of the state but as the institution where student union elections turn violent and examination papers leak. Their reference points for what a university should look like are KIIT’s glass facades and NIT Rourkela’s Google placements. The cultural expectation of what a public university should be has been lowered, and lowered expectations are the hardest thing to reverse — harder than faculty vacancies, harder than infrastructure decay, harder than political interference. You can fill a position. You can build a building. You can change a law. Restoring the belief that a public university can be excellent — that Utkal University can rank alongside Jawaharlal Nehru University or Presidency University or the University of Hyderabad — requires a transformation that no single reform can deliver.

This is the ecological point stated precisely: the soil is degraded. The seed bank is depleted. The disturbance is ongoing. Under these conditions, secondary succession is possible but not probable without sustained, deliberate, multi-decade investment of the kind that no Odisha government has shown the appetite to make.

And so the two universities coexist. One serves the nation’s middle class and earns a place in the NIRF rankings. The other serves the state’s majority and earns nothing but the quiet resignation of those who have no alternative. The pioneer forest is productive. The old-growth niche remains empty. The organisms that most need shade — the first-generation learner, the tribal student, the young woman from western Odisha whose family cannot afford four lakhs a year — stand in the sun, unsheltered, and either burn or leave.

The medical education system encapsulates this in its most extreme form. Twelve government medical colleges produce doctors at Rs 2 to 3 lakh for the full program. Five private medical colleges charge Rs 30 to 85 lakh. The ratio is roughly 1 to 30. And in both cases, the doctors leave: the government-trained doctor for super-specialization elsewhere, the private-trained doctor for metropolitan practice. Odisha’s health system — with its chronic shortage of specialists, its empty primary health centers, its dependence on AIIMS Bhubaneswar as the single point of tertiary care for a state of 46 million — is the downstream consequence of a medical education system that produces talent for other states’ hospitals.

Engineering education mirrors this: approximately 125 B.Tech colleges (16 government, 106 private), with an oversupply of seats (national vacancy rates of 30 to 44 percent), the top five institutions producing graduates with Rs 6 to 15 lakh starting salaries who leave immediately, and dozens of bottom-tier private colleges producing graduates with marginal employability who either stay underemployed in Odisha or join the migration stream at lower wage levels. The quality distribution is not a bell curve — it is a barbell, with a small cluster of excellence at one end, a long tail of mediocrity at the other, and almost nothing in the middle.

The Compounding Question

The final analytical point connects higher education to every other series in this research body.

The extraction equilibrium that The Long Arc identified — extract minerals, fund welfare, win votes, repeat — persists in part because there is no educated constituency large enough and organized enough to demand a different model. When 78 percent of youth are not in higher education, when graduate employability is 42 percent, when the universities that should produce critical thinkers and engaged citizens are instead producing graduates who cannot find jobs and migrants who cannot stay — the political feedback loop that sustains extraction over investment is strengthened, not weakened.

Tamil Nadu’s GER of 47 percent is not just an education statistic. It is a political fact. A population where nearly half of young people are in higher education demands different things from its government than a population where less than a quarter are. It demands quality healthcare (because educated mothers make different choices about their children’s health). It demands urban infrastructure (because educated workers choose employers and cities, not the other way around). It demands accountability (because education correlates with civic engagement, media consumption, and the ability to process political information beyond slogans). It demands, in short, the conditions for a knowledge economy — and that demand, expressed through electoral politics over decades, is what produces the political consensus for sustained education investment.

Odisha is at the early stages of this virtuous cycle, or perhaps more accurately, it is at the point where the cycle could begin if the right interventions are made — and where it will fail to begin if the current trajectory continues. The difference between 22 percent and 47 percent GER is not an incremental gap. It is the difference between two fundamentally different political economies: one where the electorate is sophisticated enough to demand institutional quality, and one where the electorate — through no fault of its own, but through the accumulated failure of the institutions that should have equipped it — settles for welfare transfers because it has never experienced what quality institutions feel like.

The two universities in Bhubaneswar — one crumbling, one gleaming — are not just an education story. They are the physical manifestation of the choice Odisha faces: whether to invest in the human capacity that would enable the state to move beyond extraction, or to continue running the extraction equilibrium until the minerals are exhausted and the diaspora has grown so large that the state’s most capable citizens are permanently settled elsewhere.

The succession has occurred. The canopy is dead. The pioneers are thriving. The ecological niche that matters most — accessible, democratic, quality higher education for the majority — remains empty. Whether it stays empty is not a question about education policy alone. It is a question about what Odisha decides it wants to become.