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The Welfare State — Schemes, Impact, and the Politics of Delivery

On September 17, 2024 — three months after taking power — the new BJP government in Odisha transferred Rs 1,250 crore into the bank accounts of 25 lakh women as the first instalment of the Subhadra Yojana. By March 8, 2026, the scheme had reached over one crore women, with Rs 5,100 crore disbursed in a single day. The timing was not accidental. March 8 is International Women’s Day. September 17 — the launch date — is Vishwakarma Jayanti, celebrated across India’s working classes.

Across the state, recipients of these transfers were, until a few months earlier, receiving different transfers under different names from a different government. KALIA for farmers, BSKY health cards for hospital visits, Mamata for pregnant mothers, Mission Shakti for self-help groups. The money came from the same state treasury, generated by the same mining royalties and central grants. But the branding was different. The political credit flowed to a different party.

This is the story of welfare in Odisha: the same fundamental mechanism — transfer money or services to citizens, earn their electoral loyalty — has been run by two successive governments with different names, different delivery architectures, and different ideological justifications. The BJD built one of India’s most comprehensive state-level welfare systems. The BJP is now dismantling the brand while keeping much of the plumbing, attaching it to national schemes, and adding its own programmes on top.

To understand what welfare has actually achieved in Odisha — and what it has not — you need to go scheme by scheme, look at the numbers, and ask questions that neither party’s marketing materials will answer.

KALIA: The Farmer Support That Covered Everyone and Reached Some Who Should Not Have Been Covered

The Krushak Assistance for Livelihood and Income Augmentation scheme — KALIA — was launched in December 2018, five months before the 2019 general election. The timing, again, was not coincidental.

What It Was

KALIA provided Rs 10,000 per year to small and marginal cultivators (in two instalments of Rs 5,000 each, aligned with the two crop seasons) and Rs 12,500 per year for landless agricultural labourers. Vulnerable agricultural households — those unable to cultivate due to age, disability, or disease — received Rs 10,000 annually. The scheme also included a life insurance component of Rs 2 lakh and personal accident cover of Rs 2 lakh at nominal premiums.

The Design Insight

KALIA’s most significant design choice was covering tenant farmers and sharecroppers — not just landowners. This was a deliberate departure from the central government’s PM-KISAN scheme (launched two months later, in February 2019), which restricted eligibility to landowners with Rs 6,000 per year.

The distinction matters enormously in a state where 93% of farm holdings are small and marginal, and where a substantial portion of actual farming is done by tenants who hold no legal title to the land they cultivate. PM-KISAN’s landowner criterion effectively excluded the people who do most of the physical farming in Odisha. KALIA’s broader coverage was, from a policy design perspective, the superior approach.

The Numbers

The Department of Agriculture provided KALIA assistance to 65.64 lakh beneficiaries during 2019-2021. Of these, 41.64 lakh received three instalments, 8.09 lakh received two, and 15.91 lakh received only one. The total budget exceeded Rs 10,000 crore.

What Actually Went Wrong

The CAG audit told the less flattering story. Rs 782.26 crore was distributed to 12.72 lakh ineligible beneficiaries. Another Rs 107.64 crore went to 1.28 lakh accounts where the names did not match the intended beneficiaries — suggesting payments to unauthorized persons. In total, roughly 12 lakh beneficiaries were identified as ineligible during implementation, with another 2.96 lakh found ineligible in later verification rounds.

These are not small numbers. Twelve lakh ineligible beneficiaries in a scheme targeting roughly 65 lakh people means an error rate approaching 18%. The CAG recommended prompt recovery of incorrect payments — a recommendation that, like many CAG recommendations, is easier to write than to execute.

The errors point to a chronic problem in Indian welfare delivery: the gap between design and implementation. KALIA’s design was thoughtful. Its beneficiary identification was sloppy. This is not unique to KALIA or to BJD — it is a structural feature of any large-scale transfer programme that is rolled out under electoral pressure with inadequate verification infrastructure.

The Replacement

The BJP government replaced KALIA with the CM Kisan Yojana in 2024. The new scheme provides Rs 4,000 per year to small and marginal farmers (in two instalments, on Nuakhai and Akshaya Tritiya) and Rs 12,500 for landless farmers in three instalments. For 2025-26, the government allocated Rs 2,020 crore — covering 45.77 lakh small farmers and 19.12 lakh landless farmers.

The arithmetic tells the political story. Under KALIA, a small farmer received Rs 10,000 per year from the state. Under CM Kisan, the same farmer receives Rs 4,000 from the state plus Rs 6,000 from PM-KISAN (central scheme), totalling Rs 10,000. The farmer gets the same amount. But the political credit splits: 60% now flows to the central government and BJP nationally, 40% to the state government. This is welfare rebranding as political engineering. The pipe carries the same water, but the label on the tap changes who gets thanked.

Whether this matters to the farmer at the receiving end is an open question. The answer is probably “not much, as long as the money arrives.” But it matters enormously to the political economy of federalism. When state governments run their own welfare brands, they build independent political capital. When central and state schemes merge, the state government becomes a delivery agent for the national party’s agenda. This is not unique to Odisha — it is the “double engine” model applied to welfare policy.

Mission Shakti: Seven Crore Women, Six Lakh Groups, and the Question Nobody Asks

Mission Shakti is the most organizationally ambitious welfare programme any Indian state has attempted. Understanding it requires distinguishing between what it claims to be, what it actually is, and what it might have become if politics had not intervened.

What It Is

Launched on March 8, 2001 (International Women’s Day — the BJD had an instinct for calendric symbolism), Mission Shakti promotes Women Self-Help Groups (WSHGs). The numbers are staggering: approximately 6 lakh WSHGs with roughly 70 lakh women members. In a state with a total population of about 4.5 crore, this means roughly one in three adult women in Odisha is a member of a Mission Shakti group.

The groups function as microfinance collectives: women save money together, access credit from formal banking institutions, and start livelihood activities — tailoring, handicrafts, food processing, agriculture, running small shops. The groups are federated at gram panchayat, block, and district levels, creating a layered organizational structure that reaches from the village to the state capital.

The government’s role is catalytic: it provides training, facilitates bank linkages, creates market platforms (Subhadra Shakti Cafes, Subhadra Shakti Bazaars, retail marts), and uses the SHG infrastructure to deliver other services like nutrition programmes and financial literacy.

What It Actually Achieved

The research literature on Mission Shakti is mixed in instructive ways.

On the positive side: women in SHGs report increased access to credit, greater financial independence, improved confidence in dealing with public institutions, and some degree of social empowerment. The IIPA evaluation of Mission Shakti in the KBK (Kalahandi-Balangir-Koraput) region — one of India’s most impoverished areas — found measurable improvements in women’s participation in household decision-making and access to economic resources.

The UN Capital Development Fund partnered with Mission Shakti specifically because of its scale and organizational depth. For international development organizations, Odisha’s SHG movement represents a rare case of a government programme achieving near-universal coverage among its target population.

On the critical side: the question that is rarely asked directly is whether Mission Shakti empowered women or created a patronage network that looked like empowerment.

Consider the structure. Six lakh groups, federated from village to state, with government providing training, credit linkages, and market access. This is also a description of a political mobilization infrastructure. During elections, the SHG network functioned as a parallel party apparatus for BJD — not through explicit coercion, but through the implicit logic of reciprocity. The government builds your group, links you to banks, creates markets for your products. When election time comes, who do you vote for?

The honest answer is: both things can be true simultaneously. Mission Shakti genuinely improved women’s economic participation and social status. It also functioned as a political infrastructure that delivered votes to BJD. The mistake is thinking you have to choose one interpretation. Complex social programmes do multiple things at once — that is what makes them complex.

The BJP government has notably not dismantled Mission Shakti. It has rebranded elements (Subhadra Shakti Cafes and Bazaars) and is working to integrate the network with its own schemes. This is the surest sign that the infrastructure works: the incoming government kept it.

BSKY: The Smart Health Card That Changed Hospital Visits

Biju Swasthya Kalyan Yojana — launched in 2018, now renamed Gopabandhu Jana Arogya Yojana (GJAY) under the BJP government — was Odisha’s attempt at universal health coverage.

The Design

Smart health cards were issued to families covered under the scheme — approximately 96.5 lakh families, covering 3.5 crore of the state’s 4.3 crore population. That is roughly 81% coverage. Each family received cashless treatment coverage up to Rs 5 lakh per year, with women eligible for enhanced coverage up to Rs 10 lakh.

Odisha was the first Indian state to implement a smart health card system at this scale. The cards worked at empanelled hospitals across the state (and eventually across the country), allowing beneficiaries to walk into a hospital, present their card, and receive treatment without upfront payment.

What It Achieved

Over 1.1 crore patients have used the scheme. At its peak, the system was facilitating 45 lakh instances of cashless treatment monthly. For a state where out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure had traditionally been catastrophic for poor families — often pushing households into debt spirals after a single medical emergency — this was a genuine transformation.

The scheme effectively eliminated the financial barrier to hospital access for the majority of Odisha’s population. Whether the quality of care received matched urban private hospitals is a different question (it did not, in most cases). But the basic proposition — you can go to a hospital without financial ruin — was new and life-changing for millions.

Where It Fell Short

Research identified a critical awareness gap. While 57% of households had heard of BSKY, awareness of specific procedures — what was covered during pre-hospitalization, hospitalization, and post-hospitalization — was dramatically lower. In other words, people knew the card existed but did not know what it entitled them to.

This is a common pattern in welfare programmes globally: coverage outpaces understanding. The card in your wallet is only as useful as your knowledge of what it covers. Rural beneficiaries, particularly in interior districts, often did not know they could use the card at private hospitals, or that pre-hospitalization diagnostics were included, or that follow-up care was covered.

The Rebrand

The BJP government renamed BSKY as Gopabandhu Jana Arogya Yojana in February 2025, increased urban coverage to Rs 6 lakh, expanded the hospital network to 27,000 empanelled hospitals nationwide (by integrating with Ayushman Bharat), and maintained the smart health card infrastructure. The continuity of the underlying system under a new name is, once again, evidence that the programme works. Governments do not rebrand failures — they bury them.

Mamata: The Maternity Scheme That Reduced Wasting by 39%

The Mamata scheme — a conditional cash transfer for pregnant and lactating women — is one of the few Indian welfare programmes that has been rigorously evaluated by independent researchers, and the results are genuinely impressive.

The Design

Launched in 2011, Mamata provides Rs 5,000 (approximately $70) to pregnant and nursing women aged 19 and above for their first two live births. The cash is conditional: recipients must register their pregnancy, attend antenatal care visits, receive iron-folic acid supplements, complete immunizations for the child, and attend breastfeeding counselling sessions.

This design — paying women to do things that are good for them and their children — is standard conditional cash transfer methodology. What makes Mamata notable is the scale and speed of its rollout: from 2 lakh women in January 2012 to 10 lakh by mid-2013 to 25 lakh by 2017 to 40 lakh by 2020.

The Evidence

Two peer-reviewed studies, published in the Journal of Nutrition (2022) and Health Economics (2023), evaluated Mamata’s impact using rigorous methodology.

The findings: Mamata reduced child wasting by 7 percentage points, a 39% reduction from the pre-programme prevalence. It had “positive and significant effects on food security, registration of the pregnancy, and receipt of ANC and IFA tablets from government frontline health workers.” Full child immunization improved. Antenatal care utilization increased.

But the equity findings were uncomfortable. The reduction in wasting was driven primarily by children from wealthier households — those in the top four of five national wealth quintiles experienced an 80% reduction in wasting. The poorest quintile saw much smaller gains. This is a pattern that haunts many welfare programmes: the benefits are captured disproportionately by the less-poor among the poor, while the most vulnerable see smaller improvements.

This does not make Mamata a failure — a 39% overall reduction in wasting is an extraordinary achievement. But it reveals the limits of cash transfers as an equity tool. The poorest households face barriers beyond money: distance from health facilities, lack of awareness, social exclusion, poor nutrition options in local markets. Cash alone cannot solve problems that are structural.

Rice at Re 1 Per Kilogram: The PDS That Actually Works

Odisha runs one of India’s most efficient Public Distribution Systems. The headline number — rice at Re 1 per kilogram for eligible families — understates the achievement.

The Coverage

Under the National Food Security Act, Odisha covers 82.17% of its rural population and 55.77% of its urban population. Approximately 60 lakh families receive subsidized rice every month. The difference between the central issue price and the Re 1 price is borne by the state government — a significant fiscal commitment.

The Efficiency

Utilization rates are remarkable: over 94.8% of eligible poor families actually collect their PDS grains. In a country where PDS leakage was historically so severe that a former Prime Minister (Rajiv Gandhi) famously said only 15 paise of every rupee spent on the poor actually reached them, Odisha achieving near-universal utilization is genuinely significant.

A six-state survey covering 3,800 households across Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, and West Bengal found PDS to be “near universal” in Odisha’s rural areas, with a majority of households receiving their full entitlements. Customer satisfaction runs at 85%.

How They Did It

The explanation is not glamorous. It is competent administration: end-to-end computerization of supply chains, biometric authentication at fair price shops, regular monitoring and auditing, and genuine political commitment to ensuring the system worked. Odisha’s PDS reform happened during the BJD era and was one of the clearest examples of bureaucratic capacity delivering tangible results.

The Paradox

Despite having one of India’s best PDS systems, over 60% of Odisha’s population was classified as undernourished and malnourished (as of the NFHS surveys). The poor were more calorie-deficient than in states with less efficient PDS systems.

This paradox reveals the limits of food distribution as nutrition policy. You can ensure every family gets cheap rice. You cannot ensure they eat balanced diets. Rice provides calories but not the micronutrients, proteins, and fats that prevent stunting and wasting. The PDS keeps people from starving. It does not keep them well-nourished.

This is the difference between food security and nutrition security — and it is a distinction that India’s welfare architecture has historically been poor at making.

The Disaster Management System: Odisha’s Genuine Miracle

If there is one area of governance where Odisha’s achievement is unambiguous — where even the most cynical analysis must concede that something genuinely extraordinary happened — it is disaster management.

The Numbers That Tell the Story

1999 Super Cyclone: Wind speeds of 260 km/h. Approximately 10,000 dead. 15 million people affected. Fatality rate: 779.3 per million affected.
2013 Cyclone Phailin: Comparable intensity. 47 dead. Fatality rate: 3.55 per million affected.
2019 Cyclone Fani: Wind speeds of 215 km/h. 64 dead. Fatality rate: 3.82 per million affected.

The reduction in fatality rate from 779.3 to under 4 per million affected — a 200-fold improvement — is one of the most dramatic governance transformations documented anywhere in the world. The World Bank, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum have all cited Odisha as a global model for disaster preparedness.

How It Happened

Institutional foundation. After the 1999 devastation, Odisha established the Odisha State Disaster Management Authority (OSDMA) — the first state-level disaster management body in India, created six years before the national NDMA was established in 2005.

Physical infrastructure. In 1999, there were 75 cyclone shelters along Odisha’s entire coastline. Today, there are roughly 800 multipurpose cyclone and flood shelters, designed in collaboration with IIT Kharagpur to withstand wind speeds of 300 km/h and moderate earthquakes. Each shelter serves as a community centre during normal times and a life-saving refuge during cyclones.

Early warning systems. Odisha was the first Indian state to create an end-to-end early warning system reaching the last mile. Nearly 1,200 coastal villages receive cyclone or tsunami warnings through sirens and mass messaging. Watchtowers in over 120 coastal locations form the backbone of the warning network.

Evacuation protocols. The critical operational innovation was the mass evacuation system. For Cyclone Phailin, the state evacuated over one million people in 48 hours. For Cyclone Fani, the evacuation was even larger. The system works through coordinated communication between state, district, and block levels, involvement of community leaders and SHGs (Mission Shakti groups played a role in local mobilization), pre-positioned relief materials, and rehearsed evacuation routes.

Institutional learning. The 1999 cyclone was the trauma that forced the transformation. Each subsequent cyclone became a test that refined the system. Phailin proved the evacuation protocols worked. Fani proved they scaled. The system learned from each event, correcting weaknesses and building redundancy.

Why This Matters Beyond Disaster Management

The disaster management success contains a broader lesson about governance. It is the one area where Odisha invested in long-term institutional capacity rather than short-term electoral payoffs. Building cyclone shelters does not win votes in the next election — it saves lives in the next cyclone, which may be years away. Investing in early warning systems requires sustained funding without visible short-term returns.

This is what makes the achievement remarkable. Indian governance is structurally biased toward short-cycle investments with immediate electoral returns (cash transfers, subsidy programmes, visible construction). Disaster management is a long-cycle investment with returns that materialize only during crises. That Odisha made this investment — and sustained it across two decades — suggests that certain kinds of institutional capacity can survive political transitions if the initial investment is deep enough and the results dramatic enough to create broad political consensus.

It is worth noting that the BJP government has not attempted to rebrand OSDMA or claim the disaster management infrastructure as its own. Some things are beyond politics. This is one of them.

The BJP Era: New Schemes, New Architecture

Subhadra Yojana: The Rs 50,000 Promise

Subhadra Yojana was the centrepiece of BJP’s 2024 election manifesto in Odisha. It promises Rs 50,000 to women aged 21-60 over five years, delivered through two annual instalments of Rs 5,000 — one on Raksha Bandhan, one on International Women’s Day. The money goes directly into Aadhaar-linked bank accounts.

The numbers have scaled rapidly. Launch in September 2024 with Rs 1,250 crore to 25 lakh women. By March 2026, the scheme had reached 1.02 crore women beneficiaries, with Rs 5,100 crore disbursed in a single instalment.

Subhadra is both a welfare programme and an electoral strategy. The Rs 50,000 figure is large enough to be meaningful for a low-income household — it represents roughly 5-8 months of minimum wages in Odisha. The delivery mechanism (direct bank transfer) is clean and traceable. The timing (linked to festivals and women’s day) ensures that the transfer is a recurring reminder of who provided it.

The scheme operates in the same conceptual space as BJD’s women-focused programmes (Mission Shakti, Mamata) but uses a different mechanism. Mission Shakti was organizational — it built groups, created collective enterprises, developed skills. Subhadra is transactional — it gives money directly. Both approaches have merits. The organizational approach builds long-term capacity but is slow and hard to scale. The cash transfer approach is fast and scalable but does not create lasting institutional change.

If you think of welfare as software, Mission Shakti was trying to upgrade the operating system. Subhadra is running a faster application on the existing OS.

CM Kisan Yojana: The Arithmetic of Replacement

As discussed above, CM Kisan Yojana replaced KALIA, reducing state support from Rs 10,000 to Rs 4,000 per farmer while combining with PM-KISAN’s Rs 6,000 to maintain the same total. The operational numbers: 45.77 lakh small farmers and 19.12 lakh landless farmers enrolled, with a state budget of Rs 2,020 crore for 2025-26.

The critical question is whether the combined scheme maintains KALIA’s coverage of tenant farmers. PM-KISAN restricts eligibility to landowners. If CM Kisan follows the same restriction, tenant farmers and sharecroppers — the most vulnerable agricultural workers — lose coverage. If it maintains KALIA’s broader eligibility, the combined scheme works. The operational details matter more than the branding, but operational details rarely make headlines.

Gopabandhu Jana Arogya Yojana: BSKY By Another Name

The rebranding of BSKY as GJAY in February 2025 is the clearest example of continuity-through-renaming. The smart health card infrastructure stays. The hospital network stays (and expands to 27,000 nationally through Ayushman Bharat integration). Urban coverage increases from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 6 lakh. The scheme is named after Gopabandhu Das — the pre-independence Odia leader and founder of Samaja newspaper — replacing Biju Patnaik’s name.

The rename is symbolically loaded. Biju Patnaik is the BJD’s founding myth. Gopabandhu Das is a pan-Odisha figure claimed by no single party. By renaming the health scheme, BJP detaches a popular programme from its competitor’s political lineage while connecting it to a more universally revered historical figure. It is, in branding terms, a hostile acquisition of political goodwill.

Godabarish Mishra Adarsha Vidyalaya: The Education Investment

The BJP government’s most ambitious new programme is the Godabarish Mishra Adarsha Prathamika Vidyalaya scheme — a plan to establish one model primary school in each of Odisha’s 6,794 gram panchayats. Named after the legendary Odia educationist and nationalist, the programme has an approved outlay of Rs 12,000 crore to set up 2,200 schools in three years. The first phase is rolling out 835 schools at Rs 7 crore each.

This is notable for two reasons. First, the scale of investment is genuinely large — Rs 12,000 crore for primary education is a statement of priority. Second, it is a long-cycle investment. Primary schools do not produce electoral returns for years — the children educated in these schools will not vote for another decade. That the BJP government is making this investment suggests either genuine commitment to education reform or confidence that it will be in power long enough to claim credit when results materialize. Possibly both.

The programme also includes the revival of 45-51 heritage schools — each over a century old — which roots the initiative in Odisha’s educational history rather than presenting it as a purely top-down modernization project.

Central Scheme Integration: The “Double Engine” in Practice

The less visible but arguably more consequential change is the systematic integration of central and state welfare delivery. Under BJD, Odisha ran its own branded schemes alongside (and sometimes in competition with) central programmes. Under BJP, the architecture is being merged.

PM Awas Yojana (housing), Ujjwala (cooking gas — 32 lakh women beneficiaries in Odisha), Jan Dhan (bank accounts), Ayushman Bharat (health), and PM-KISAN (farmer support) are being woven into a unified delivery system where the state government executes centrally designed programmes. The beneficiary experiences a seamless welfare ecosystem; the political credit flows to the national brand.

This is the “double engine” not as slogan but as administrative reality. And its electoral impact is measurable. Research from the Carnegie Endowment found that Ujjwala beneficiaries were 4.6 percentage points more likely to vote BJP. PM Awas Yojana housing beneficiaries showed comparable political impact. When you multiply these effects across dozens of schemes and millions of beneficiaries, you begin to understand why BJP won Odisha’s tribal and rural constituencies that had been BJD strongholds for decades.

The Structural Analysis: What Welfare Actually Does

The Beneficiary-Voter Pipeline

Both BJD and BJP used welfare as political infrastructure, not merely social policy. The mechanism is the same in both cases:

Identify a target population (farmers, women, patients, mothers).
Design a transfer (cash, voucher, health coverage, subsidized food).
Deliver the transfer with the governing party’s branding.
The recipient associates the benefit with the party in power.
At election time, the accumulated goodwill translates into votes.

This is not cynical — it is the fundamental mechanism of democratic accountability. Governments that deliver tangible benefits to citizens should win elections. The question is whether the welfare is designed for maximum citizen benefit or maximum electoral benefit — and the honest answer is that in practice, the two objectives are usually aligned but sometimes diverge.

They diverge most obviously in timing. KALIA was launched five months before the 2019 election. Subhadra was launched three months after BJP took power, positioning maximum disbursements before the next election cycle. Pre-election welfare expansion is a pattern so universal in Indian democracy that it barely registers as noteworthy. But it does affect design: schemes launched under electoral pressure tend to prioritize speed of rollout over accuracy of targeting (hence KALIA’s 12 lakh ineligible beneficiaries).

The Feedback Loop Asymmetry

This is the deeper structural insight. Governments invest disproportionately in welfare programmes with fast feedback loops (cash transfers, subsidized food, health cards) over programmes with slow feedback loops (education, institutional capacity, environmental protection).

Cash transfers work on a quarterly or annual cycle: the government sends money, the citizen receives it, the political credit accrues immediately. Education works on a generational cycle: the government builds a school, staffs it, and the results show up twenty years later when the children enter the workforce. A rational vote-maximizing government will always prefer the fast cycle.

This explains why Odisha has one of India’s best PDS systems (fast feedback), a well-functioning health card programme (fast feedback), and generous farmer support (fast feedback) — but continues to have poor educational outcomes, high malnutrition, and weak institutional capacity in areas that do not produce immediate political returns.

The disaster management system is the exception that proves the rule. It was built not because of electoral logic but because of trauma — the 1999 super cyclone was so catastrophic that the political cost of not building the system exceeded the cost of the long-term investment. Absent such extreme catalysts, the bias toward short-cycle welfare persists.

The BJP’s Godabarish Mishra school programme is an interesting test case. If the government sustains the Rs 12,000 crore investment over the full three-year horizon and beyond, it will be a meaningful departure from the fast-feedback bias. If the programme is quietly scaled back after the initial announcements, it will confirm the pattern.

Does Welfare Reduce Poverty or Create Dependency?

This is the question that both supporters and critics of Odisha’s welfare state must confront — and the answer from the data is more nuanced than either side prefers.

The poverty reduction data is real. Odisha’s multidimensionally poor population declined from 29.34% in 2015-16 to 15.68% in 2019-21, according to NFHS data analysed for the National Multidimensional Poverty Index. That is 62.6 lakh people moved above the poverty threshold in five years. This is among the fastest poverty reduction rates in India during this period.

But the remaining poverty is harder to solve. The easy-to-reach poor — those who needed one or two interventions (food, housing, or cash) to cross the threshold — have largely been covered. The remaining 15.68% face deeper structural barriers: low nutrition, lack of safe cooking fuel, poor sanitation, inadequate housing. These require different interventions than simple cash transfers.

The “dependency” narrative is overstated, but not entirely wrong. The concern that welfare creates passive recipients who lose the incentive to improve their own conditions is a standard right-of-centre critique. The Odisha data does not strongly support this — labour force participation has not declined in response to welfare expansion, and the vast majority of beneficiaries use transfers to complement rather than replace earned income. But there is a subtler form of dependency: political dependency. When citizens’ well-being is tied to government transfers, they become structurally invested in the continuation of the governing party. This is not laziness — it is rational behaviour. But it does create an asymmetry of power between government and citizen that healthy democracies should find uncomfortable.

The fundamental question is about thresholds. Welfare programmes are extraordinarily effective at moving people from extreme deprivation to basic subsistence. The Re 1 rice programme prevents starvation. BSKY prevents medical bankruptcy. KALIA prevents crop-season destitution. These are genuine and important achievements. But welfare programmes are much less effective at the next transition — from basic subsistence to genuine economic mobility. That transition requires productive employment, skill development, functioning labour markets, and the kind of medium-enterprise ecosystem that Odisha conspicuously lacks (94.67% of the state’s MSMEs are micro-enterprises).

Odisha’s welfare state has been excellent at the first job and largely silent on the second. Both BJD and BJP have invested heavily in the transfer mechanisms that prevent the floor from falling out. Neither has invested comparably in the ladders that allow people to climb.

A Comparative Note: What Odisha’s Welfare System Looks Like From Outside

Odisha’s welfare architecture, taken as a whole, is one of the most comprehensive in India. The PDS is among the most efficient. The health coverage system is among the most ambitious. The SHG network is among the largest. The disaster management system is globally recognized.

What is notable — and what neither party’s narrative captures — is the disjunction between this impressive welfare infrastructure and the state’s persistent development deficits. Odisha ranks 13th of 17 major states in GSDP. Per capita income is 8.8% below the national average. 83% of the population is rural. The mining districts that generate the state’s revenue perform worse on child malnutrition than the state average — a within-state resource curse.

The welfare system addresses these deficits at the symptom level. It provides food to the hungry, healthcare to the sick, cash to the broke. What it does not do — and what no welfare system can do by itself — is address the structural reasons why Odisha remains poor despite sitting on extraordinary mineral wealth. Those reasons are industrial policy failures, the absence of a medium-enterprise ecosystem, an education system that does not prepare workers for the economy, infrastructure gaps in railways and roads, and the persistent extraction of mineral wealth by national corporations that generate profits in Mumbai and Delhi rather than development in Keonjhar and Sundargarh.

Welfare is the analgesic. The disease is structural. Odisha’s political conversation — dominated by which party’s welfare brand is superior — has been remarkably successful at avoiding the harder conversation about why the analgesic is needed in the first place.

What Comes Next: The Welfare State at a Crossroads

The transition from BJD to BJP has changed the branding of Odisha’s welfare state but not yet its fundamental architecture. Cash transfers will continue. Health coverage will expand. Food distribution will persist. The political credit will flow to different names on the same programmes.

The interesting question is whether the BJP government will attempt something the BJD government never did: use welfare as a platform for productive transformation rather than simply as a safety net.

The Godabarish Mishra school programme is a hopeful sign — long-term educational investment that, if sustained, could change the human capital equation. The integration with central schemes brings national resources and standards but also reduces state-level policy autonomy. The Subhadra Yojana puts cash directly into women’s hands, which international evidence suggests is one of the most effective ways to stimulate local economies.

But the structural challenges remain untouched. The missing middle in Odisha’s enterprise landscape. The brain drain of educated workers to Bangalore and Hyderabad. The resource curse that generates mining revenue for the treasury while leaving mining communities among the poorest in the state. The agricultural crisis that forces six to eight lakh workers into seasonal migration under conditions that sometimes amount to bonded labour.

Welfare keeps the floor from collapsing. Odisha needs someone — some government, some political leader, some institutional innovation — to start building the ceiling.

The record suggests that no one is incentivized to try. The welfare-for-votes model works. It worked for BJD for twenty-four years. It is working for BJP now. As long as elections can be won by expanding transfers, the harder work of structural transformation will remain the thing everyone agrees is necessary and no one prioritizes.

This is not a failure of any single party or leader. It is a failure of the incentive structure of democratic welfare politics itself. And until someone in Odisha — or someone watching Odisha — names this dynamic clearly, the welfare state will continue to be both Odisha’s greatest achievement and its most effective distraction.

Source Research

The raw research that informs this series.