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Chapter 4: The New Order --- BJP’s Odisha Under Mohan Majhi

On June 12, 2024, eight days after the election results ended twenty-four years of BJD governance, a man whom most of Odisha had never heard of walked up to the podium at the Janata Maidan in Bhubaneswar and took the oath as the state’s fifteenth Chief Minister. Mohan Charan Majhi --- four-time MLA from Keonjhar, member of the Santal tribal community, son of the late Gunaram Majhi from the village of Raikala --- was not anyone’s prediction for Chief Minister. Not the media’s, which had been breathlessly speculating about Dharmendra Pradhan or Suresh Pujari. Not the BJP’s own state-level leaders, many of whom had more seniority, more visibility, and a stronger claim on the job by conventional political logic. Not even, if one reads the tea leaves of the oath ceremony correctly, some of the senior BJP functionaries standing behind him on the stage, their smiles calibrated to the precise degree that party discipline requires.

The selection of Majhi was not a conventional political reward. It was a structural signal, and understanding that signal --- who it was aimed at, what it communicated, and what it constrained --- is the first step to understanding the new order in Odisha.

The Man From Raikala

Mohan Charan Majhi was born on January 6, 1972, in Raikala village in Keonjhar district --- one of the most mineral-rich and simultaneously impoverished districts in India. His parents, Gunaram Majhi and Bale Majhi, were Santals, members of one of India’s largest tribal communities, a people whose cultural and linguistic traditions predate by millennia the political categories --- Hindu, Indian, Odia --- that now organize their administrative existence.

Majhi’s educational trajectory tells you something about what it takes for a tribal youth from a mining district to enter the professional class. He completed high school at Jhumpura High School in 1987, graduated from Anandapur College in 1990, earned a BA from Chandra Sekhar College, and then --- the crucial qualification for Indian politics --- an LLB from Dhenkanal Law College. He married Dr. Priyanka Marndi, and they have two sons. It is a biography of steady, unremarkable upward mobility --- the kind that millions of Indians from marginalized communities have attempted, and the kind that succeeds often enough to sustain the democratic imagination but rarely enough to make each success noteworthy.

His political career began where Indian politics most often begins: at the panchayat level. He served as sarpanch of Raikala panchayat from 1997 to 2000, while simultaneously working as secretary of the BJP’s tribal wing in Odisha. In 2000 --- the same year Naveen Patnaik won his first election --- Majhi was elected to the Odisha Legislative Assembly from Keonjhar. He won again in 2004 and served as deputy chief whip from 2005 to 2009, when the BJD-BJP alliance was still intact.

Then came the wilderness years. After the BJD broke its alliance with the BJP in 2009, Majhi lost the Keonjhar seat in both 2009 and 2014 --- a decade of electoral exile that, in Indian politics, usually means permanent irrelevance. He came back in 2019, winning Keonjhar again, and served as chairman of the Public Accounts Committee from 2022 to 2024, a respected but unglamorous legislative role.

This is not the profile of a man being groomed for Chief Minister. This is the profile of a loyal party worker, a tribal leader with local credibility, a man who did his time in the organizational trenches and earned his stripes through persistence rather than charisma. And that, precisely, is why the BJP chose him.

Why a Tribal CM: The Strategic Logic

The selection of Mohan Majhi as Chief Minister was a decision made in Delhi, not Bhubaneswar. The party’s central leadership --- the decision-making apparatus around Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah --- chose Majhi over more prominent contenders for reasons that were strategic rather than sentimental.

Reason One: The Tribal Signal. Odisha’s tribal population is 22.8 percent --- among the highest in any Indian state. Of the 147 assembly constituencies, 33 are reserved for Scheduled Tribes. The BJP had just executed one of the most significant tribal vote consolidations in Odisha’s history, breaking the BJD’s decades-long hold on tribal districts through a combination of central welfare schemes, organizational groundwork, and cultural mobilization. Choosing a tribal CM was the structural completion of that project. It told every tribal voter in Keonjhar, Sundargarh, Mayurbhanj, Koraput, and Kandhamal: this is not tokenism, this is not a welfare scheme, this is power. One of you is now leading the state.

For a population that has experienced governance primarily as extraction --- mines dug under their land, forests cleared for projects, development plans made in Bhubaneswar and Delhi without their meaningful participation --- the symbolic weight of a Santal Chief Minister should not be underestimated. Symbols, in Indian politics, have a material consequence: they determine who believes the system is theirs and who experiences it as alien.

Reason Two: The Keonjhar Credential. Keonjhar is not just any tribal district. It is the heart of Odisha’s mining belt, the district where the tension between mineral extraction and tribal rights is most acute. The Shah Commission found massive illegal mining in Keonjhar and Sundargarh --- 22.80 crore tonnes of ore extracted illegally, losses exceeding Rs 59,000 crore. A Chief Minister from Keonjhar carries implicit credibility on the mining question, regardless of what policies he actually implements.

Reason Three: Organizational Loyalty. Majhi is an RSS and BJP man to the marrow. His political career has been spent entirely within the BJP’s organizational structure. He has no independent power base, no factional army, no capacity to challenge the central leadership. In the BJP’s governance model --- where the CM is an implementer of the central party’s vision rather than an autonomous decision-maker --- this is not a weakness. It is a feature. Majhi will do what Delhi says, and he will do it without the ego conflicts that a Dharmendra Pradhan or a KV Singh Deo might generate.

Reason Four: Defusing Factional Competition. The BJP’s Odisha unit had multiple leaders with legitimate claims to the Chief Minister’s chair. Dharmendra Pradhan, the Union Education Minister, had been the organizational architect of the Odisha campaign. KV Singh Deo had five consecutive assembly victories, a royal lineage, and years of ministerial experience. Suresh Pujari was another senior contender. Choosing any of these figures would have elevated one faction and alienated the others. Choosing Majhi --- an unexpected, non-factional candidate --- sidestepped the problem entirely. Nobody’s rival got the job.

This is a pattern the BJP has employed repeatedly across states: choose a relatively unknown, organizationally loyal figure as CM (Yogi Adityanath in UP was the exception, not the rule --- think Bhupendra Patel in Gujarat, Basavaraj Bommai in Karnataka, or Pushkar Singh Dhami in Uttarakhand). The message is consistent: the party is bigger than any individual, and the central leadership makes the decisions.

The Power Architecture: Deputy CMs and Cabinet

The configuration of Majhi’s government reveals the balancing act the BJP performed across Odisha’s political geography.

Kanak Vardhan Singh Deo, Deputy Chief Minister. Singh Deo is political royalty in the most literal sense. His grandfather, R.N. Singh Deo, was Chief Minister of Odisha from 1967 to 1971 --- the last non-Congress, non-BJD Chief Minister before Majhi. The family are the titular Maharajas of Patnagarh, descendants of the Bolangir royal house. KV Singh Deo himself has won the Patnagarh assembly seat five times (1995, 2000, 2004, 2009, and 2024, with a loss in between), served as a cabinet minister in the Naveen Patnaik government during the BJD-BJP alliance years (Industry and Public Enterprise from 2000-2004, Urban Development from 2004-2009), and was a former president of BJP Odisha. His wife, Sangeeta Kumari Singh Deo, was a four-term Member of Parliament from Bolangir.

As Deputy CM, Singh Deo holds the Agriculture and Farmers’ Empowerment and Energy portfolios --- both critical for western Odisha, his home region, which has long felt neglected by the coastal-focused power structure in Bhubaneswar. His appointment signals to western Odisha that the region now has a voice at the highest level. Structurally, he represents the upper-caste, landed, traditional political class within the BJP --- a counterweight to Majhi’s tribal, grassroots profile.

He won Patnagarh in 2024 by a mere 1,357 votes, a margin that suggests his personal base, while durable, is far from dominant. His power within the government derives less from electoral invincibility than from his family’s historical weight, his organizational seniority, and the central leadership’s need to keep western Odisha represented in the power structure.

Pravati Parida, Deputy Chief Minister. Parida’s appointment broke new ground: she became the first woman Deputy Chief Minister in Odisha’s history. Born in 1966, trained as a lawyer at Utkal University, she had been a BJP worker for years and served as the women’s wing president of the party in Odisha. Her electoral record before 2024 was marked by persistence rather than success: she lost the Nimapara assembly seat in 2009 (as an independent), 2014, and 2019, each time to BJD candidates with substantial margins. She finally won Nimapara in 2024 by 4,588 votes.

Her portfolios --- Women and Child Development, Mission Shakti, and Tourism --- place her in charge of the very institutional infrastructure that the BJD built for women’s empowerment. The irony is structural: Pravati Parida, a BJP politician, now administers Mission Shakti, the self-help group network of over seventy lakh women that was Naveen Patnaik’s signature social program. Her job is to rebrand and redirect an apparatus that was built by and identified with the opposition.

The Broader Cabinet. Chief Minister Majhi retained the Home and Finance portfolios --- a signal that he (or rather, Delhi through him) controls the two levers that matter most in Indian state governance: the police and the money. Key cabinet ministers include Suresh Pujari (Revenue and Disaster Management), Rabi Narayan Naik (Rural Development, Panchayati Raj and Drinking Water), and Nityananda Gond (School and Mass Education, ST and SC Development, and Minorities and Backward Classes Welfare). Gond’s combined charge of education and tribal development is significant --- these are the two domains where the BJD’s failures were most structural and where the BJP’s promises will be most consequentially tested.

Early Policy Moves: What Changed and What Was Rebranded

The BJP government’s first year can be divided into two categories of action: genuine policy departures and what might charitably be called “nomenclature reform” --- the systematic rebranding of BJD-era schemes under new names.

Subhadra Yojana: The Flagship

The Subhadra Yojana, launched by Prime Minister Modi himself on September 17, 2024, is the BJP’s most ambitious state-level welfare scheme and its most direct competitor to the BJD’s Mission Shakti and KALIA. The design is straightforward: eligible women between 21 and 60 years of age, with family income below Rs 2.5 lakh annually, receive Rs 50,000 over five years through direct bank transfers. The money comes in two annual installments of Rs 5,000 each, disbursed on Raksha Bandhan and International Women’s Day.

The scale is substantial. Approximately one crore women are targeted as beneficiaries. The total budget allocation is Rs 55,825 crore over the scheme’s lifetime. NFSA and SFSS cardholders are automatically eligible, which means the scheme captures the poorest households by default.

The design contains a clever nudge toward digital adoption: the top 100 women in each gram panchayat and urban local body who make the most digital transactions receive an additional Rs 500. This is a small incentive but a structurally interesting one --- it attempts to create a behavioral shift (toward digital payments) by embedding it within a welfare transfer.

How does Subhadra compare to what it replaced? The BJD’s Mission Shakti was not primarily a cash transfer program --- it was an organizational infrastructure of self-help groups that provided credit access, livelihood support, and (critics said) a political mobilization network for the BJD. KALIA, the farmer income support scheme, provided Rs 10,000 per year to small and marginal farmers (Rs 5,000 each in kharif and rabi seasons). Subhadra is a different animal: a pure cash transfer to women, unconditional except for the income eligibility requirement. It is, in welfare policy terms, closer to the PM-KISAN model (direct cash, no conditions, no organizational infrastructure) than to Mission Shakti’s SHG model (institutional capacity building, collective action).

The tradeoff is telling. Cash transfers are popular, visible, and easy to administer. They show up in bank accounts with the government’s name on them. They create a direct beneficiary-party link. But they do not build institutional capacity --- they do not create the organizational infrastructure that Mission Shakti, whatever its political uses, genuinely provided. Whether Subhadra produces better outcomes for women than Mission Shakti did is a question that cannot be answered for years. Whether it produces better electoral outcomes for the BJP is a question that will be answered at the next election.

CM Kisan Yojana: The KALIA Replacement

The BJP replaced KALIA --- the Krushak Assistance for Livelihood and Income Augmentation scheme that was the BJD’s signature farmer support program --- with the CM Kisan Yojana, announced in September 2024. The comparison reveals something about the BJP’s governance philosophy.

Under KALIA, small and marginal farmers received Rs 10,000 per year in two installments. The scheme was distinctive because it covered tenant farmers and agricultural laborers, not just landowners, recognizing a reality that the central PM-KISAN scheme ignores: many of India’s poorest farmers do not own the land they work.

Under CM Kisan, small and marginal farmers receive Rs 4,000 per year in two installments --- disbursed on Nuakhai (the harvest festival of western Odisha) and Akshaya Tritiya. Landless farmers receive Rs 12,500 in three installments. The first installment of Rs 2,000 was distributed at Sambalpur on Nuakhai in September 2024; the second on Akshaya Tritiya on April 30, 2025. The scheme covers 45.76 lakh small and marginal farmers and 19.12 lakh landless farmers, with a budget of Rs 1,935 crore for 2024-25.

The arithmetic is uncomfortable for the BJP: Rs 4,000 per year is less than half of KALIA’s Rs 10,000. The government’s argument is that CM Kisan is complementary to PM-KISAN (which provides Rs 6,000 per year), so the combined central-plus-state farmer support is Rs 10,000. But the critical difference is that CM Kisan targets farmers not covered by PM-KISAN, while KALIA covered everyone including those already receiving PM-KISAN. For a farmer who was receiving both KALIA and PM-KISAN under the old regime, the net effect is a reduction in income support. Whether this reduction was offset by the increased paddy MSP of Rs 3,100 per quintal under the Samrudh Krushak Niti depends on the individual farmer’s production volume, and for the smallest and most marginal farmers --- the ones who produce little surplus for market sale --- the MSP increase is largely irrelevant.

The Great Renaming

Beyond the genuinely new schemes, the BJP government’s first budget --- Rs 2.65 lakh crore for fiscal year 2024-25 --- was characterized by a systematic renaming of BJD-era programs. The pattern is a familiar one in Indian politics when a new party takes power, but the comprehensiveness of the exercise in Odisha was notable:

BJD-Era Scheme	BJP Rename
Biju Swasthya Kalyan Yojana (BSKY)	Gopabandhu Jan Arogya Yojana (GJAY)
KALIA	CM Kisan Yojana
Biju Pucca Ghar Yojana	Renamed (aligned with PM Awas)
Biju Setu Yojana	Setu Bandhan Yojana
Make in Odisha	Utkarsh Utkal
Ama Odisha Nabin Odisha	Vikasit Gaon Vikasit Odisha
Mission Shakti (partially)	Lakhpati Didi Sahayika Yojana

The GJAY, allocated Rs 5,450 crore, replaces BSKY while running alongside the central PM-JAY (Ayushman Bharat) scheme. It provides cashless treatment at approximately 27,000 empanelled hospitals. The coverage is comparable to BSKY, but the branding has shifted: “Biju” --- the reference to Biju Patnaik that the BJD used as a branding prefix for nearly everything --- has been replaced by “Gopabandhu,” a reference to Gopabandhu Das, the early twentieth-century social reformer and freedom fighter who is revered across Odisha’s political spectrum.

The renaming exercise reveals a structural tension in the “double engine” model. On one hand, the BJP government wants to erase the BJD’s branding from Odisha’s welfare architecture, replacing it with names that align with the BJP’s ideological references or the central government’s scheme naming conventions. On the other hand, most of these schemes are substantively similar to what they replaced --- the same beneficiaries, the same delivery mechanisms, the same basic design. The government changed the label on the bottle. Whether it changed the wine is, so far, unclear.

Bureaucratic Reshuffling

The BJD’s governance model had created an unusually stable bureaucratic apparatus. IAS officers served long tenures, developed deep familiarity with their domains, and established relationships with political leaders and local communities. Critics called this “bureaucratic capture” --- the entrenchment of a permanent administrative class that was loyal to the BJD’s system rather than to any democratic accountability mechanism.

The BJP’s response was immediate and comprehensive. The first reshuffle came in July 2024, within weeks of taking office: 20 senior IAS officers were transferred. Subsequent rounds followed in August and November 2024. In July 2025, a massive overhaul moved 49 IAS officers, including additional chief secretaries, principal secretaries, and 15 of the state’s 30 district collectors.

The scale of the reshuffling has triggered debate. Supporters argue that it was necessary to break the BJD’s bureaucratic networks and install officers who would implement the new government’s vision. Critics point to the disruption of ongoing programs, the loss of institutional memory, and the politicization of what should be an apolitical administrative service. Some worry that the frequent reshuffles --- the government conducted major transfer exercises roughly every four months in its first year --- create instability rather than accountability. When a district collector knows that his or her tenure is measured in months rather than years, the incentive is to deliver quick, visible results rather than invest in long-term institutional capacity.

The deeper issue is philosophical. The BJD model empowered bureaucrats at the expense of political accountability. The BJP model reasserts political control over the bureaucracy. Neither model resolves the fundamental tension in Indian governance: how do you make bureaucrats effective enough to deliver services while keeping them accountable enough to prevent entrenchment? The BJD’s answer (stability and autonomy) produced competence in some domains and capture in others. The BJP’s answer (frequent rotation and political control) may produce responsiveness while sacrificing continuity.

The “Double Engine” Reality

“Double engine” --- the same party governing at the center and in the state --- is the BJP’s signature pitch in state elections. The promise is simple: alignment between state and central governments eliminates friction, accelerates development, and brings more central resources to the state. The reality is more complicated.

Where the Double Engine Delivers

The most tangible benefit of the double engine model has been in central project approvals. The Union Cabinet approved the Rs 8,307 crore Capital Region Ring Road project for Bhubaneswar --- a major infrastructure initiative that would decongest the twin cities of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack and improve connectivity to the airport and the planned AIIMS campus. Two semiconductor manufacturing units were approved for Odisha under the India Semiconductor Mission: SiCSem, a Silicon Carbide compound semiconductor fab in Bhubaneswar (in collaboration with the UK’s Clas-SiC Wafer Fab Ltd, with an annual capacity of 60,000 wafers), and 3D Glass Solutions, which will manufacture ultra-thin glass wafers for semiconductor packaging. Of the four semiconductor projects approved by the central government in August 2025, two came to Odisha.

These are not trivial approvals. Semiconductor manufacturing is one of the most strategically consequential industries of the 21st century, and Odisha’s selection as a site --- ahead of many other states that competed for these projects --- is a direct benefit of political alignment with the central government. The Capital Region Ring Road addresses a genuine infrastructure deficit. The approval process for both projects was, by Indian standards, remarkably fast.

Industrial investment has continued its upward trajectory. The Utkarsh Odisha — Make in Odisha Conclave, held January 28-29, 2025, generated 593 investment proposals worth Rs 16.73 lakh crore, with 145 MoUs signed for Rs 12.89 lakh crore across 16 sectors. The Adani Group alone pledged Rs 2.3 lakh crore across power, cement, industrial parks, aluminum, city gas, and port expansion. The projected employment potential is 12.88 lakh jobs.

The Kalinganagar steel cluster saw significant expansion: Chief Minister Majhi inaugurated 24 new projects worth Rs 1.15 lakh crore, including Tata Steel’s Rs 47,599 crore expansion and Neelachal Ispat Nigam’s Rs 61,769 crore steel plant, projecting 36,000 jobs. The Paradip petrochemical complex, anchored by IOCL’s Rs 58,042 crore chemical complex, is advancing. Green hydrogen projects worth over Rs 2 lakh crore are concentrated around Paradip and Gopalpur.

The state’s GSDP growth of 7.2 percent in 2024-25, outpacing the national average of 6.5 percent, is real.

Where the Double Engine Costs

The price of alignment is autonomy. Under the BJD, Odisha’s Chief Minister’s Office was the sovereign decision-making node for state policy. Welfare schemes were designed, branded, and delivered by the state government, creating a distinct identity for Odisha’s governance model. The relationship with Delhi was transactional: support was given in Parliament in exchange for central resources, and withdrawn when the calculation changed. The BJD could oppose the center on the Mahanadi water dispute, criticize central mining policy, and maintain an independent foreign policy position (to the extent that Indian states have one) without political consequence.

Under the BJP, Odisha is integrated into a national governance framework where state priorities align with --- critics would say are subordinated to --- national party priorities. The systematic renaming of state schemes is the visible symptom. The invisible cost is the loss of policy autonomy: decisions about mining, industrial policy, environmental clearance, and tribal rights are now made within a framework where the central government’s priorities carry more weight than they did under the BJD.

The most concrete example is the scheme rebranding itself. When BSKY becomes GJAY, the substantive change may be minimal, but the political economics change fundamentally. Under the BJD, the state government took credit for healthcare delivery. Under the BJP, the credit is shared between state and central schemes (GJAY and PM-JAY), and the central brand increasingly dominates the beneficiary’s perception. This is not an accident. It is the mechanism by which the BJP’s national governance model works: centralize the brand, distribute the delivery, and ensure that the political benefit flows upward to the national party rather than staying with the state leader.

For Odisha’s long-term institutional development, the question is whether this trade --- autonomy for alignment, state identity for national integration --- produces net positive outcomes. The double engine model accelerates project approvals and central funding. But it also means that Odisha’s policy choices are increasingly constrained by national party calculations that may not align with the state’s specific needs. A mining policy designed for national industrial growth may not serve the interests of Keonjhar’s tribal communities. An education policy aligned with the National Education Policy may not address Odisha’s specific crisis of vacant faculty positions and closed schools. A cultural policy driven by Hindutva may sit uncomfortably in a state where tribal religious traditions, Buddhist heritage, and the universalism of the Jagannath tradition create a spiritual landscape far more diverse than any single ideology can accommodate.

BJP vs. BJD: A Governance Model Comparison

The shift from BJD to BJP is not merely a change of party. It is a change of governance architecture --- a different theory of how power should be organized, how decisions should be made, and what the relationship between a state and the center should look like.

Dimension	BJD Model (2000-2024)	BJP Model (2024-present)
Leadership	Personalist --- everything centered on Naveen’s image and authority	Centralized national leadership --- CM as implementer of party vision
Party Organization	Weak; dependent on bureaucracy and leader’s personal brand	Strong cadre-based; RSS organizational backbone at booth level
Ideology	Pragmatic regionalism --- “Odisha first” over any ideological commitment	Hindutva + development (“double engine”); national integration over regional autonomy
Center-State Relations	Strategic equidistance; transactional support for central government	Full alignment; state as extension of national governance framework
Welfare Delivery	State-branded schemes; direct beneficiary targeting under Odisha identity	Central + state scheme convergence; PM-branded schemes replace or supplement state ones
Bureaucracy	Empowered, stable, technocratic --- long tenures, deep domain knowledge	Politically controlled --- frequent transfers, rotational postings, central oversight
Cultural Politics	Soft Odia sub-nationalism; avoided Hindutva-secular binary; Jagannath as regional symbol	Hindu consolidation; Jagannath as Hindu deity within national framework; tribal-Hindu integration
Resource Governance	Balanced mining expansion with some tribal protections; state-controlled auctions	Pro-mining liberalization; alignment with central industrial policy; faster clearances
Decision-Making	CM-centric; decisions made in Bhubaneswar	Delhi-centric; key decisions coordinated with central leadership
Opposition Role	Minimal effective opposition for most of the period	BJD as opposition; still finding its voice and organizational footing

The structural difference is fundamental. Under the BJD, Odisha was an autonomous unit within the Indian federal system --- making its own choices, branding its own governance, and maintaining a degree of independence that allowed it to negotiate with the center from a position of leverage. Under the BJP, Odisha is integrated into a national governance machine --- more efficient in some dimensions (faster approvals, larger central fund flows) but less independent in others (policy autonomy, cultural identity, scheme branding).

The historical parallel is illuminating. What the BJP has done in Odisha mirrors what it has done in other states where it replaced long-standing regional parties: in Assam (replacing AGP), in Tripura (replacing CPI-M), in Haryana (establishing dominance over INLD). In each case, the pattern is the same: a cadre-based national party replaces a personalist or regionally focused party, integrates the state into the national governance framework, and uses the “double engine” model to deliver visible development benefits while consolidating political control. Whether this model is durable --- whether voters eventually chafe at the loss of regional autonomy and punish the BJP, as voters in Karnataka eventually did --- is the open question.

The Jagannath Temple Moves

No account of the Majhi government’s first year would be complete without the Jagannath Temple issue, which functioned simultaneously as a religious gesture, a political masterstroke, and a structural signal about the BJP’s approach to cultural governance.

Within the first hundred days of taking office, the government opened all four gates of the Jagannath Temple in Puri. Previously, only the Singhadwara (Lion Gate) had been open; the Ashwa Dwara (Horse Gate), Vyaghra Dwara (Tiger Gate), and Hasti Dwara (Elephant Gate) had remained closed, causing genuine hardship for the large numbers of devotees who visit the temple daily. The BJP announced Rs 500 crore for the temple’s beautification and repair.

On July 14, 2024 --- barely a month after taking office --- the government reopened the Ratna Bhandar (treasury) of the Jagannath Temple after 46 years. The team faced difficulties in unlocking the inner chamber with the provided keys, ultimately breaking three locks to gain entry. The opening was both a fulfillment of an election promise (the BJP had campaigned heavily on the “missing keys” controversy) and a symbolic assertion of governance transparency.

These moves were popular. They addressed genuine grievances of devotees and fulfilled specific campaign promises. But they also positioned the Jagannath Temple --- which in the Odia imagination transcends sectarian politics and belongs to all Odias regardless of caste, tribe, or political affiliation --- within the BJP’s broader Hindu-nationalist governance framework. The Rs 500 crore corpus fund, the opening of the treasury, the four-gate access --- each of these individually is defensible as good governance. Collectively, they signal that the BJP understands the centrality of Jagannath to Odia identity and intends to claim ownership of that relationship.

Challenges: What the New Order Inherited and Cannot Easily Fix

The BJP won Odisha by promising to solve problems that no party in power has solved. The question is whether the constraints are political --- amenable to a change in political will --- or structural --- persistent regardless of which party governs.

The Industrialization Question

Odisha’s fundamental economic challenge remains unchanged: the state sits on extraordinary mineral wealth but has not converted that wealth into a broad-based industrial economy. The numbers from the Utkarsh Odisha summit --- Rs 16.73 lakh crore in investment proposals --- are impressive until you compare them to the Make in Odisha conclave of 2018, which generated Rs 4.19 lakh crore in investment intentions with a conversion rate of less than four percent (Rs 15,917 crore actually materialized). The BJP government claims a conversion rate of sixty-three percent for the 2025 summit. History suggests caution.

The structural constraints on industrialization in Odisha are not political. They are geological (the minerals are under tribal land), demographic (communities have learned to resist displacement since the POSCO debacle), environmental (Odisha is one of India’s most biodiverse states, and environmental clearance is genuinely complicated), infrastructural (despite port and road improvements, the hinterland connectivity that industrial supply chains require is inadequate), and educational (the workforce for advanced manufacturing does not exist domestically --- a consequence of the education crisis that both the BJD and BJP have failed to address).

The “double engine” advantage is real but limited. Central government alignment can accelerate environmental clearances, ease land acquisition through policy changes, and channel more central infrastructure funding to the state. But it cannot eliminate the fundamental tradeoffs. A mining expansion that displaces tribal communities will face resistance regardless of which party orders it. An industrial project that pollutes a river will encounter opposition regardless of the speed of its clearance. The BJP’s industrial ambitions for Odisha will be tested not by the number of MoUs signed but by the number of factories actually built, and that number depends on resolving structural constraints that no amount of political will can bypass.

The Education Emergency

The education crisis in Odisha is not a problem. It is an emergency, and neither the BJD nor the BJP has treated it as one.

The numbers are damning. Of 1,911 sanctioned teaching positions across 17 state universities, 1,187 --- nearly 68 percent --- are vacant. Newer institutions like Odia University (Satyabadi) and Vikram Dev University (Jeypore) function entirely with guest faculty. Between 2018 and 2023, 7,478 government schools were closed. The engineering graduates the state produces overwhelmingly migrate to Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Pune.

The BJP government has taken some steps. The Odisha University (Amendment) Act of 2024 allows universities to conduct their own recruitment rather than depending on the Odisha Public Service Commission, which should theoretically speed up hiring. Plans to merge the Board of Secondary Education and the Council of Higher Secondary Education into a single body aim to streamline school education governance. The government has announced recruitment drives for 40,000-plus primary teachers.

These are positive steps. But they do not address the fundamental problem: Odisha’s education system is not producing the human capital that an industrial economy requires, and fixing this requires sustained investment over a decade or more --- exactly the kind of long-feedback-loop investment that democratic governments, optimized for electoral cycles, systematically underdeliver. The BJP’s track record on education in other states it governs does not inspire confidence that this will be different.

Western Odisha’s Grievances

The Kosal region --- Sambalpur, Bargarh, Bolangir, Kalahandi, Nuapada, and surrounding districts --- has grievances that predate BJP rule, BJD rule, and arguably Indian independence. The poverty rate in Kosal districts was 68.7 percent compared to 54.3 percent in coastal Odisha (1999-2000 data). Literacy rates are 54-58 percent versus 68-70 percent. Infrastructure --- roads, irrigation, electricity, healthcare --- is systematically inferior. Over 60,000 families (approximately two lakh people) from Bolangir, Nuapada, Kalahandi, and surrounding districts migrate annually as dadan (bonded) laborers to brick kilns in Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu.

The BJP drew significant support from western Odisha in 2024. Dharmendra Pradhan won Sambalpur with a massive margin. KV Singh Deo, from Bolangir’s royal family, was made Deputy CM. The CM Kisan Yojana’s first installment was deliberately distributed in Sambalpur on Nuakhai --- the harvest festival that is the cultural heartbeat of western Odisha. Chief Minister Majhi held the first-ever public grievance hearing by an Odisha CM outside Bhubaneswar, in Sambalpur.

These are meaningful gestures. But gestures do not build roads. The dadan labor system that sends young men from Bolangir to Gujarat’s construction sites is a structural consequence of the absence of local employment, and local employment requires exactly the industrialization that has been announced and failed to materialize for decades. The BJP government’s target of 1 lakh-plus jobs by 2030 in migration-origin districts is ambitious. Whether it materializes will determine whether the BJP retains western Odisha’s support or whether the accumulated grievances that brought down the BJD eventually consume its successor as well.

Tribal Rights vs. Mining Push

This is the structural tension that will most acutely test the Majhi government, and the irony of a tribal Chief Minister presiding over an accelerated mining liberalization is not lost on anyone who studies Odisha’s political economy.

The BJP government has approved new mineral rules --- the Odisha Minerals (Prevention of Illegal Mining and Regulation of Trading, Transportation and Storage) Rules, 2025 --- replacing the 2007 rules. The stated aim is to prevent illegal mining, theft, and smuggling while creating a “more efficient mineral governance system.” Critics point out that the government has been slow to recover fines from illegal mining operators and that the new rules, whatever their stated purpose, align with the central government’s mining liberalization framework.

Odisha’s mining revenue is critical to the state’s fiscal health --- it generates 84 percent of non-tax revenue. The temptation to accelerate mining, particularly under a “double engine” government that faces fewer bureaucratic hurdles from the center, is enormous. But every mine sits on tribal land. Every expansion displaces communities. The Niyamgiri story --- where the Dongria Kondh successfully resisted Vedanta’s bauxite mining through a combination of legal action, international solidarity, and sheer tenacity --- is Odisha’s most powerful example of tribal resistance, and it happened under a government (the BJD) that was far less enthusiastic about mining than the BJP is.

Majhi’s Santal identity gives him credibility in tribal communities that a non-tribal CM would not have. But credibility and policy are different things. If the Majhi government accelerates mining at the expense of tribal land rights, the credibility will erode quickly. If it constrains mining to protect tribal communities, the central government’s industrial ambitions for Odisha will be frustrated. There is no resolution to this tension, only management, and how the Majhi government manages it will determine its relationship with the 22.8 percent of Odisha’s population that made its election possible.

The First Year Assessment

The Majhi government completed its first year in June 2025 claiming that half of its 21 key election promises had been fulfilled. The claim requires scrutiny, but the direction of the first year is discernible.

What worked: The Jagannath Temple gestures were popular and visible. The Subhadra Yojana’s cash transfers reached women’s bank accounts with reasonable efficiency. The paddy MSP increase to Rs 3,100 per quintal benefited farmers who produce marketable surplus. The investment summits generated impressive numbers on paper. The semiconductor project approvals were a genuine policy win. The government’s stance on law and order --- including, notably, action against BJP members involved in criminal activity --- earned credibility.

What did not work: The CM Kisan Yojana’s reduction from KALIA’s Rs 10,000 to Rs 4,000 was a tangible step backward for the poorest farmers. The bureaucratic reshuffling, while arguably necessary, created instability. The education crisis remained unaddressed in any structural sense. The mining governance showed continuity with the BJD’s approach --- the same deference to corporate interests, the same slow recovery of illegal mining fines, the same gap between stated intent and enforcement. The sand mafia and minor mineral operators continued to operate with impunity.

What remains uncertain: Whether the investment summit MoUs will convert into actual factories and jobs. Whether the “double engine” advantage will produce structural improvements in infrastructure and human capital. Whether the BJP can deliver on its promise to create 3.5 lakh jobs in five years. Whether Majhi can develop an independent governing identity or will remain, as critics argue, a delegate of Delhi in Bhubaneswar.

The Structural Question

Zoom out from the policy specifics and the first year of the Majhi government raises a question that extends far beyond Odisha: what happens when a cadre-based national party replaces a personalist regional party in a state with deep structural challenges?

The BJD model, for all its failures, had a theory of governance: empower a competent bureaucracy, deliver welfare efficiently, maintain fiscal discipline, and keep the center at arm’s length. The theory worked in domains where feedback loops were tight (disaster management, fiscal management, food distribution) and failed in domains where they were not (education, healthcare, industrialization). It produced selective competence --- world-class in some areas, world-worst in others.

The BJP model has a different theory: integrate the state into the national governance framework, use the party’s organizational depth for political mobilization, align state policy with central priorities, and deliver through a combination of central and state schemes. This theory may work better in some domains (project approvals, central funding, cross-state coordination) and worse in others (local responsiveness, cultural autonomy, policy innovation that requires divergence from the national template).

The deeper question is whether either model addresses Odisha’s fundamental challenge: converting mineral wealth and human talent into a functioning modern economy. The BJD did not do this in twenty-four years. The BJP is promising to do it in five. The structural constraints --- the missing middle in enterprise structure, the education crisis, the tribal rights tension, the brain drain, the announcement-to-factory conversion gap --- are not partisan. They are geological, demographic, and institutional. They do not care which party’s flag flies over the Secretariat.

What is different is the context. Odisha now has a government aligned with the center, which eliminates certain friction and creates certain dependencies. It has a tribal Chief Minister, which changes the optics of governance in tribal areas even if it does not change the structural economics. It has a cadre-based party organization at the booth level, which gives it a feedback mechanism that the BJD lacked. And it has a set of promises --- 3.5 lakh jobs, Rs 50,000 for every woman, paddy at Rs 3,100 per quintal, corruption-free governance --- that will serve as the benchmarks against which the next election will be fought.

The earthquake of 2024 toppled the old order. The question for the new order is not whether it can win elections --- the BJP has demonstrated that it can --- but whether it can do what no government in Odisha’s history has managed: build an economy that keeps its people home.

The Mahanadi still flows to the sea. The minerals still leave on ships from Paradip. The engineers still buy one-way tickets to Bangalore. The measure of the Majhi government, the measure of the new order, will be whether any of this changes --- not in the announcements and MoUs and investment summits, but in the lived reality of the forty-six million people who call Odisha home.

Source Research

The raw research that informs this series.