Narrative series

Institutional Design

Why OSDMA works and nothing else does — patterns of institutional success and failure.

8 chapters · 77,358 words

Read the series introduction →

Chapters

  1. 01 Chapter 1: The Exception The first cyclone arrived on October 17, 1999. 9,118 words
  2. 02 Chapter 2: The Machine That Runs on Nothing In March 2023, the Government of Odisha announced the Mukhya Mantri Krushi Udyog Yojana -- the Chief Minister's Agri-Business Scheme -- with an allocation of Rs 100 crore. The scheme promised to promote food processing and agricultural entrepreneurship across the state. A press r 9,465 words
  3. 03 Chapter 3: The Anatomy of the Exception In December 2013, two months after Cyclone Phailin had struck the Odisha coast and killed 44 people instead of the thousands that the storm's intensity had led many to fear, a senior OSDMA official was asked by a journalist what the secret of the successful evacuation was. The of 9,093 words
  4. 04 Chapter 4: The Patronage Equilibrium On the morning of June 14, 2024 -- two days after Mohan Charan Majhi was sworn in as Odisha's first tribal Chief Minister -- the Government of Odisha issued transfer orders for 50 IAS officers. District Collectors in 15 of 30 districts were replaced. The Principal Secretary to th 9,217 words
  5. 05 Chapter 5: What Worked Elsewhere In March 2023, a mid-sized Japanese auto components manufacturer -- annual revenue approximately $400 million, 3,000 employees across three countries -- began evaluating sites for a new precision machining facility in India. The company needed 50 acres of industrial land with rel 10,979 words
  6. 06 Chapter 6: The Missing Institution In 2019, a steel company with operations across four countries began evaluating Odisha for a downstream processing facility -- flat steel products for the automobile sector, the kind of value addition that the SeeUtkal Value Chain series documented as Odisha's most consequential 9,785 words
  7. 07 Chapter 7: The Builders In the first week of January 2001, a senior IAS officer named Aurobindo Behera received a posting that no one in the Odisha cadre wanted. The position was Managing Director of a new body called the Odisha State Disaster Management Authority -- an institution that did not yet exis 9,297 words
  8. 08 Chapter 8: The Operating System In Chapter 2, we stood inside the machine and watched it run on nothing. The operating system metaphor was diagnostic: Odisha's governance apparatus is the OS layer between hardware (the physical infrastructure, the human capital, the fiscal resources) and applications (the schem 10,404 words

Source Research

The raw research that informs this series.