English only · Odia translation in progress

Chapter 2: The Inserted Economy

On the morning of April 6, 1948, the Government of India published its first Industrial Policy Resolution. The document was thirty-seven paragraphs long, workmanlike, and largely forgotten today. But buried in its classification scheme was a decision that would determine Odisha’s economic structure for the next half-century. The resolution divided all industries into four categories. The first — the exclusive preserve of the state — included arms and ammunition, atomic energy, and railways. The second, where the state would take the lead while permitting some private activity, included coal, iron and steel, aircraft, shipbuilding, telecom, and — critically — the mining of iron ore and other key minerals.

Odisha in 1948 possessed roughly a quarter of India’s coal, more than a quarter of its iron ore, half its bauxite, nearly all its chromite, and the bulk of its manganese. On paper, these reserves were the foundation of an industrial economy waiting to happen. The 1948 resolution announced, with no ambiguity, that the industries built on this foundation would belong to the central government. Eight years later, the Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956 made this explicit: Schedule A reserved seventeen industries exclusively for the state, including iron and steel, heavy machinery, and the mining of iron ore, coal, and other key minerals.

The effect was architectural. Before a single factory was built, the policy framework had determined that Odisha’s minerals would be exploited by central government entities, managed from New Delhi, and operated according to national priorities that had no structural obligation to the state whose ground was being dug up. What followed over the next four decades — Hirakud, Rourkela, coal nationalisation, NALCO, and the invisible catastrophe of freight equalisation — was not a series of independent decisions. It was a single economic logic working itself out through different materials.

That logic produced what might be called an inserted economy: heavy industry placed into Odisha’s geography without growing from Odisha’s soil. The distinction is not semantic. It is the difference between an organ transplant and a growing limb. A transplant can be impressive — large, functional, technically sophisticated. But it arrives from outside, is maintained by external expertise, operates according to its own biochemistry, and never develops the vascular connections that would make it part of the host body. The rejection is not violent. The transplant survives. It simply never integrates. The host body feeds it without being nourished by it.

The Dam as Prologue

The pattern begins with water, not metal.

On January 13, 1957, Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurated the Hirakud Dam across the Mahanadi River — 25.8 kilometres of concrete and earth dyke that made it India’s longest dam. The project had been conceived two decades earlier by the engineer M. Visvesvaraya, supervised by the Central Water Commission from Delhi, and designed by American consultants. It cost Rs 100.02 crore in 1950s terms. Its stated purposes were flood control, irrigation, and hydroelectric power.

The dam’s reservoir swallowed 325 villages. Approximately 22,000 families — somewhere between 110,000 and 150,000 people — lost their homes, their cultivated fields, and in many cases their entire web of social relationships. The submerged land included 123,000 acres of cultivated area, some of the most fertile soil in western Odisha: Mahanadi floodplain, centuries of accumulated silt, the kind of land that farming communities do not voluntarily leave.

The compensation tells you who mattered and who did not. The government budgeted Rs 9.5 crore. It disbursed Rs 3.32 crore — 35 percent. Not 35 percent of what was fair. Not 35 percent of what would have made the displaced whole. Thirty-five percent of the amount the government itself had decided was the minimum adequate payment. The remaining 65 percent vanished into bureaucratic absorption — procedural barriers, arbitrary land valuations, underspending that nobody in Delhi was accountable for correcting.

What makes Hirakud the prologue rather than merely the first chapter is the subsequent diversion of its purpose. The dam was designed to irrigate 1,347,000 acres. As of the most recent assessment, it achieved approximately 55.85 percent of that vision — about 753,000 acres. The gap is not primarily a failure of engineering. The canals were built. The water was available. What happened was a reallocation.

By the mid-1990s, industrial water consumption from the Hirakud reservoir had begun to climb. By 2007, it had increased sixfold compared to pre-1997 levels. Aluminium smelters, steel plants, and thermal power stations — the very heavy industries that central policy had inserted into Odisha’s landscape — were drawing water that had been promised to farmers. The dam that drowned 325 villages to irrigate the delta was increasingly feeding factories. And here is the detail that completes the template: the industries were paying half the price for reservoir water that the farmers were charged.

In November 2007, 30,000 farmers from eight districts converged on the Hirakud reservoir area, demanding that the dam’s water be used for its original purpose. Over 300,000 farmers across the command area were affected. The protest received brief national attention and changed nothing structurally. The factories needed the water. The factories had political weight. The farmers had history on their side and nothing else.

Hirakud established the template in its purest form: national need identified, local population displaced with systematically inadequate compensation, benefits captured by external interests, costs left with the community that bore the displacement. The dam was not built for Sambalpur. It was built on Sambalpur, for the nation. The difference between those two prepositions contains the entire political economy of Odisha’s post-independence development.

The Cathedral That Did Not Reproduce

Two years after Hirakud was inaugurated, on February 3, 1959, Nehru returned to Odisha to inaugurate the Rourkela Steel Plant — India’s first integrated steel plant built with foreign collaboration in the public sector. The location was Sundargarh district, a tribal heartland where the Oraon, Munda, Kharia, and Gond communities had lived for centuries on subsistence agriculture and forest produce. The technology came from Germany: Krupp and Demag of Duisburg formed a joint venture, and the German engineering colony at Rourkela became the largest German community outside Germany.

The choice of Rourkela was driven by the same logic that would govern every major industrial insertion in Odisha: the minerals were there. Iron ore in the Keonjhar-Sundargarh belt, coal from the Jharsuguda-Ib Valley, water from the Brahmani River. On a map, the economics were irrefutable. On the ground, the insertion created a dislocation so complete that two worlds — the steel city and the tribal district — would coexist for seven decades without integration.

Land acquisition for the plant and township consumed approximately 19,772 acres from over 32 villages. An additional 11,923 acres were taken for the Mandira Dam to supply the plant with water, submerging 31 more tribal villages. Between 68 and 90 percent of those displaced were Scheduled Tribes. Research found that 78.7 percent of displaced families lost their land entirely. They became seasonal labourers, dependent on the edges of the industrial economy that had swallowed their world but unable to access its better-paying permanent positions.

Inside the plant boundary, the story was different. The steel city became cosmopolitan: Hindi, Bengali, Odia, Telugu, and Punjabi workers lived alongside German engineers. Hospitals, schools, and recreational facilities were built to standards that outstripped the state capital. A sports culture flourished. Rourkela developed, and retains, a cultural sophistication that has no parallel in western Odisha.

But this sophistication was an island. The initial capacity was one million tonnes per annum of crude steel; subsequent expansions brought it to two million, then four and a half million after modernisation completed in 2015-16. By FY 2021-22, the plant generated revenue of Rs 26,830 crore and profit before tax of Rs 6,347 crore. These are real numbers. Real production. Real revenue. And almost none of the generative economic activity that should have accompanied them in the surrounding economy.

The question is not whether Rourkela produced steel. It did, at increasing volumes for sixty-seven years. The question is why Rourkela did not produce Rourkela — why the presence of a massive anchor factory, sustained for nearly seven decades, failed to generate the organic industrial ecosystem that emerged around comparable anchor investments elsewhere.

Consider the counterfactual 170 kilometres southeast: Jamshedpur. Tata Steel was founded in 1907 in a similarly remote tribal district. Initial conditions were comparable — displacement, land acquisition, the gulf between an industrial operation and a subsistence economy. What diverged was ownership. The Tata family had a permanent, multigenerational stake in the city. Their career incentives were not three-year rotational postings evaluated in Delhi but the accumulated return on a family investment that could only succeed if the surrounding economy succeeded with it. Over 119 years, this structural incentive produced Adityapur — approximately 1,500 industrial units, of which 600 to 700 are economically integrated into the anchor company’s supply chain. Jamshedpur is an ecosystem. Rourkela, after sixty-seven years, has no equivalent cluster.

Five structural factors, each reinforcing the others, explain the divergence: external workforce (skilled workers recruited from Bengal, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh; NIT Rourkela graduates migrating out); centrally appointed management (rotating three-year postings, evaluated in Delhi, no stake in local ecosystem); nationalised procurement (centralised supply chain with no mandate for local supplier development); an undeveloped local economy too far from the steel plant’s input requirements to participate without deliberate bridge-building; and — most critically — no forced linkages. India did not require Rourkela to source locally, to transfer capabilities on a timeline, or to mandate downstream processing in Sundargarh. South Korea did all of these with POSCO. The projects existed in the geography but were not of the geography. The result was a stable equilibrium: the cathedral stands in the village, and the village remains a village.

The Invisible Policy That Did the Most Damage

If the Industrial Policy Resolutions of 1948 and 1956 determined who would own the factories, and if Rourkela demonstrated how an inserted factory fails to integrate, then the Freight Equalization Policy determined that no organic factory could grow at all.

Enacted in 1952, maintained for forty-one years until 1993, the FEP was the most consequential central policy in Odisha’s modern economic history — and it operated in near-total obscurity, understood by economists but invisible to the public discourse until decades after the damage was done.

The mechanism was simple. The central government subsidised the railway transport of key industrial raw materials — coal, iron ore, steel, pig iron, cement, and later bauxite and fertilisers — so that they could be delivered at uniform prices across the country. A factory in Mumbai paid the same price for Odisha’s iron ore as a factory in Rourkela, sitting on top of the ore deposit. The natural cost advantage of proximity — the most basic economic incentive for industrial clustering near raw material sources, the force that built the Ruhr Valley and Pittsburgh and Pohang — was eliminated by administrative fiat.

The stated intent was balanced regional development. The actual effect was the transfer of competitive advantage from mineral-rich eastern states to the already better-positioned west and south.

The decision facing any industrialist between 1952 and 1993 was straightforward. Without freight equalisation, proximity to ore means lower input costs — the basic economic logic that built the Ruhr Valley, Pittsburgh, and Pohang. With freight equalisation, the ore costs the same in Mumbai as in Rourkela. Mumbai has the port, the banking, the labour market, the existing supply chains. Rourkela has nothing else. The rational choice, for forty-one years, was to build in the west.

John Firth and Ernest Liu, in a Cornell University study using India’s Annual Survey of Industries from 1959 to 2013, documented the causal link: manufacturing output growth in affected downstream sectors in eastern states was approximately 0.6 percentage points slower annually, while the policy boosted growth in distant western states by 0.5 to 0.9 percentage points. Compounded over four decades, this produced the industrial geography of modern India. Odisha’s per capita income fell from approximately 71 percent of the national average in the 1960s to approximately 54 percent by 1990-91. The FEP era corresponds precisely to this relative decline.

The damage was not merely factories not built. It was the entire secondary ecosystem — component suppliers, engineering firms, training institutions, financial infrastructure — that never materialised because there were no anchor factories to cluster around. In software platform economics, this is called negative network effects: each missing factory made the next factory less likely, compounding absence rather than presence.

When the FEP was abolished between 1991 and 1993, the industrial geography was fixed. Removing the policy could not undo four decades of compounding absence. In May 2024, Finance Minister Sitharaman acknowledged that the eastern states “suffered in the past” due to the FEP — the first such admission by a sitting Finance Minister. What she did not say is that the damage is structural. You can remove the freight equalisation. You cannot recreate the industrial ecosystem that was prevented from forming.

The Coal That Left

While the FEP ensured that no organic industrial culture could develop around Odisha’s mineral endowment, the Coal Nationalisation Acts of 1971-73 ensured that Odisha’s most abundant energy resource would be controlled from outside the state.

The nationalisation came in two phases. The Coking Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act of 1972 brought coking coal under government control. The Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act of 1973 completed the process for non-coking coal. All private coal mines were absorbed into Coal India Limited, a new central government monopoly. In Odisha, the operational arm became Mahanadi Coalfields Limited — MCL — a Coal India subsidiary headquartered not in Odisha but answerable to Coal India’s Kolkata headquarters and the Ministry of Coal in Delhi.

The scale of what was nationalised is extraordinary. Odisha sits on approximately 24 percent of India’s proven coal reserves. The Talcher Coalfield alone holds 38.65 billion tonnes — the largest single coalfield in India. MCL’s production trajectory tells the story of a resource increasingly exploited: approximately 30-40 million tonnes per year in the pre-liberalisation period, climbing to 60.2 million tonnes by 2003-04, 154 million tonnes by 2020-21, and 239 million tonnes in 2023-24. Odisha is now India’s top coal-producing state, responsible for roughly 23 to 25 percent of national output.

These are numbers that should correspond to a transformed local economy. They do not.

The coal was mined in Odisha. The coal was loaded onto trains in Odisha. The coal left Odisha. The profits flowed to Coal India’s consolidated accounts. The strategic direction was set in Kolkata. The procurement decisions were made nationally. The power generated from Odisha’s coal fuelled factories and cities across India. The coal value chain — power generation, industrial chemicals, carbon products, the employment and tax revenue of coal consumption — operated overwhelmingly outside the state.

The pattern is identical to the steel plant and the aluminium smelter: a nationally owned entity, centrally managed, processing a resource fixed to Odisha’s geography, with the value chain extending into other states’ economies. The villages of Angul and Dhenkanal hosted the mines and bore the environmental costs — dust, water pollution, land degradation, displacement. The economic returns were distributed nationally.

The 2020 amendment to the Coal Mines Act allowed commercial mining by private players, partially reversing nationalisation fifty years later. But like the withdrawal of the FEP, the reversal came after the structural consequences were embedded. Half a century of centralised control had shaped institutional capacity, workforce composition, and the absence of a local coal-based industrial ecosystem. The coal companies are now partially privatised. The ecosystem deficit remains.

The Aluminium Machine

If Rourkela demonstrated the inserted economy with steel, NALCO demonstrated it with aluminium — and added a fiscal dimension that makes the extraction arithmetic explicit.

The National Aluminium Company Limited was established on January 7, 1981. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi laid the foundation stone in March of that year. French technical assistance from Pechiney provided the technology. The project was designed to exploit the Panchpatmali bauxite deposit in Koraput district — one of the largest bauxite reserves in India — through a vertically integrated operation: opencast mining at Panchpatmali (capacity 6.825 million tonnes per annum), alumina refining at Damanjodi at the foot of the hills (capacity 2.1 million tonnes per annum), and aluminium smelting at Angul, approximately 600 kilometres north, where a 1,200-megawatt captive power plant fuelled by coal could supply the enormous electricity that aluminium smelting demands.

The original project cost was approximately Rs 2,400 crore — a massive investment in early-1980s terms. The Government of India owns 51.28 percent of NALCO’s equity.

Follow the money. In FY 2023-24, NALCO recorded a net profit of Rs 2,060 crore and paid Rs 918 crore in dividends. In FY 2024-25, the dividend to the Government of India alone was a record Rs 988.88 crore. Nearly Rs 1,000 crore per year flows from Odisha’s bauxite to Delhi’s treasury.

Where does the bauxite come from? Koraput district, where rural poverty among tribal populations has historically been measured at 74.2 percent. The aluminium is sold at London Metal Exchange prices. The profit is distributed to the Government of India, which uses it in the general budget allocated across all states on population-weighted formulas that do not privilege the state whose ground was dug up.

NALCO’s rehabilitation record at Damanjodi was better than the Hirakud norm — 599 of 600 land-displaced persons were given employment by 2022. But the structural pattern is unchanged. A national company, on Odisha’s soil, processing Odisha’s minerals, with profits flowing to the Centre. The aluminium value chain beyond ingots — downstream fabrication into auto parts, aerospace components, packaging, electrical conductors — happens elsewhere, in western and southern India where the aluminium is consumed and converted into products.

The 2024 Pottangi expansion tells you how much the pattern has evolved in four decades. In June 2024, NALCO executed a new mining lease for the Pottangi bauxite deposit: 697.979 hectares, 111 million tonnes of estimated reserves, 3.5 million tonnes annual production capacity, 32-year mine life. Tribal communities in the area responded with “NALCO Go Back” slogans, stalling the ceremonial groundbreaking, demanding that land settlement issues be resolved before mining began. The specific complaint — that the mining lease was signed without adequate Gram Sabha approval, as required by the Forest Rights Act and the Niyamgiri precedent — is a demand for consent, not a rejection of modernity. And it is a demand that the inserted economy model, by its design, cannot accommodate, because the model’s decision-making authority sits in Delhi, not in the gram sabha.

The Algebra of Insertion

Step back from the individual projects and look at the structural arithmetic they share. In every case — Hirakud, Rourkela, MCL, NALCO — the equation is the same:

Local inputs (land, minerals, water, displacement of people) + External inputs (capital, technology, management, skilled labour from outside) = Output (steel, aluminium, electricity, coal) transferred to the national market, with profits flowing to the central exchequer and costs remaining with the local community.

This is not exploitation in the crude sense of colonial plunder. Nobody in the Planning Commission set out to impoverish Odisha. The Nehruvian vision was genuinely national: India would industrialise as one country, and the minerals of the east would fuel factories that served the entire population. The vision was noble. The structural consequence for the resource locality was identical regardless of intent: value created here, captured elsewhere. Costs stay. Benefits leave.

The inserted economy is distinguishable from an organic economy by a single diagnostic: does the economic activity reproduce? Does it generate secondary activity, supplier networks, skill accumulation, institutional development that compounds over time?

A garden metaphor is useful here. A garden produces less per harvest than a mine, but each season strengthens the soil. A mine produces enormous output, but each extraction depletes the resource. The Nehruvian insertions were mines, not gardens. They extracted value from Odisha’s geography — steel, aluminium, coal, electricity — and shipped it out. They did not strengthen the soil. The villages surrounding Rourkela Steel Plant are no more industrially capable today than they were in 1959. The districts surrounding MCL’s coal mines have not developed coal-based chemical or manufacturing industries. Koraput, which hosts NALCO’s bauxite mining and alumina refining, remains one of India’s poorest districts.

The reason the inserted economy does not reproduce is embedded in its ownership structure. SAIL is a Government of India enterprise. Its dividends flow to the central exchequer. Its management is appointed centrally. Its procurement is controlled nationally. NALCO follows the same logic — 51.28 percent central government ownership, dividends to Delhi, corporate tax to the Centre, LME-priced aluminium revenue on the national balance sheet. MCL follows the same logic through Coal India’s consolidated accounts. In each case, the entity that decides where to reinvest is not in Odisha and has no structural incentive to build an Odisha-based ecosystem.

The combination of the Industrial Policy Resolutions (which determined central ownership), the FEP (which prevented organic private-sector industrialisation), and coal nationalisation (which completed the centralisation of resource control) created a triple lock. Central ownership ensured that industrial knowledge stayed within project boundaries. The FEP ensured that even knowledge that leaked out could not be commercially exploited locally. Coal nationalisation ensured that the energy resource base was controlled externally. The village could see the cathedral. It could not learn from it. And even if it had learned, the economic system ensured the knowledge would be worthless locally.

What the Transplant Analogy Reveals

The organ transplant metaphor illuminates two dynamics that economic analysis sometimes obscures.

First, the dependency trap. An inserted economy never generates the vascular connections — shared knowledge, supplier relationships, institutional trust, a locally adapted workforce — that an organic economy develops over time. Without them, the insertion relies permanently on external maintenance. This is why discussions of disinvestment or privatisation of entities like NALCO or SAIL are so fraught in Odisha: the local economy has developed no capacity to absorb the transition, precisely because the inserted model prevented that capacity from developing.

Second, the quiet rejection. The body accepts the organ but routes around it rather than through it. Rourkela produces steel; the local economy routes around it. NALCO produces aluminium; the local economy routes around it. MCL produces coal; the local economy routes around it. The heavy industries exist in the geography as nodes in a national production system, connected upward to Delhi and outward to national markets, but not laterally to the surrounding economy. They are enclaves, not ecosystems.

The deeper insight is about mental models. The Nehruvian planners treated the economy as a machine — identify the input (minerals), insert the processing unit (factory), extract the output (steel, aluminium). But an economy is an organism where every part must develop in relation to every other part. South Korea understood this in the 1960s: Korea saw the factory as a seed for an ecosystem; India saw it as a production unit in a national plan. The seed produces a garden. The production unit produces output. The garden compounds. The output leaves.

The Economy That Was Designed

The inserted economy was not an accident. It was the logical outcome of Nehruvian economic planning as applied to a mineral-rich, politically weak state.

The timeline reveals cumulative, not episodic damage. Industrial Policy Resolutions (1948, 1956) set the ownership framework. The FEP (1952) eliminated the market incentive for private industrialisation near mineral sources. Hirakud was commissioned in 1957. Rourkela began production in 1959. Coal was nationalised between 1971 and 1973. NALCO was established in 1981. Each policy reinforced the others. By the mid-1960s, the combined effect was already measurable: per capita income declining relative to the national average, manufacturing employment stuck at 5 to 6 percent of the workforce, agriculture still employing over 60 percent.

The Planning Commission’s job was to allocate national resources for national production. The question “what happens to the village around the factory” was not part of the design specification. It was an externality — in the precise economic sense, a cost not borne by the decision-maker. The planner who assigned Rourkela to produce steel had no line item for Sundargarh ecosystem development. The planner who designed freight equalisation had no mandate to model its effect on eastern India over four decades. Each planner optimised for their assigned objective. The aggregate effect — Odisha as a raw material supplier within a democratic framework — was nobody’s explicit intent and everybody’s structural outcome.

When the FEP was finally abolished in 1993 and the National Mineral Policy of the same year liberalised mining, what followed was revealing. Mining investment surged. Iron ore production would eventually quadruple. But the surge was in extraction, not processing. Odisha now produces roughly 28 percent of India’s iron ore but hosts only about 15 percent of the steel capacity its ore feeds. The pattern survived the policy that created it because the pattern had been institutionalised in infrastructure, workforce composition, supply chains, and the absence of local industrial culture.

The word “colony” in this context is chosen deliberately and with qualification. Odisha was not a colony politically — it elected its government, its citizens had full democratic rights. But economically — an economy whose primary function is to supply raw materials for processing elsewhere, with value addition and profit capture occurring outside the resource geography — the structure is colonial. The mechanism is fiscal rather than military. The extraction is legal rather than coercive. The democratic framework creates the appearance of consent. The structural outcome is functionally identical regardless.

I believe with approximately 70 percent confidence that the FEP was the single most damaging central policy in Odisha’s modern economic history. I hold this with less than complete confidence because isolating the causal contribution of one policy within a complex interacting system is inherently difficult. What I am fully confident about is that the combination of central ownership, freight equalisation, and coal nationalisation created a policy environment in which Odisha’s organic industrialisation was structurally impossible — not difficult, not unlikely, but impossible as a natural market outcome.

This is not a partisan statement. The inserted economy was built under Congress governments. It was maintained under non-Congress governments. It was deepened by liberalisation under Narasimha Rao. It was not challenged by the BJD’s twenty-four years of state power. It has not been structurally altered by the BJP since 2024. The inserted economy is a product of India’s institutional architecture for managing mineral-rich states — an architecture that has remained remarkably stable across seven decades and multiple regime changes.

What Remained by 1993

By the time the FEP was abolished in 1993, Odisha possessed:

On the asset side — one of India’s longest dams, a functional steel plant now expanded to 4.5 million tonnes capacity, India’s largest integrated aluminium producer, and coal production approaching 40 million tonnes annually. These were real assets, generating real output, employing thousands of people, and connecting Odisha to the national industrial system.

On the liability side — 325 villages drowned for Hirakud, over 30,000 families displaced across the major projects, compensation systematically dishonoured, a cosmopolitan steel city surrounded by subsistence agriculture, an aluminium smelter sending nearly Rs 1,000 crore per year to Delhi from one of India’s poorest districts, no industrial ecosystem, no local supplier networks, no entrepreneurial class rooted in manufacturing, no technical workforce anchored in the local economy, and a per capita income that had fallen from 71 percent to 54 percent of the national average over the FEP era.

Manufacturing employment stood at approximately 5 to 6 percent of the total workforce. Agriculture still employed over 60 percent. The minerals were being extracted at increasing rates, but the value chain was built somewhere else. The heavy industries were present in the landscape but absent from the local economy in any generative sense.

The transplant had survived. It had never integrated. The economy had been inserted, not grown. And the policy architecture that had produced this outcome — central ownership, freight equalisation, nationalised resource control — had been in place long enough for its consequences to become self-perpetuating, outlasting the policies themselves.

What came next — the post-liberalisation mining explosion, the MoU economy, POSCO’s twelve-year debacle, the DMF and the auction system — is the subject of the next chapter. But it is a chapter that only makes sense against this inheritance: an economy designed in Delhi, inserted into Odisha, and left to produce output without ever producing the capacity for self-sustaining development.

Sources

  1. Government of India. “Industrial Policy Resolution, 1948.” Ministry of Industry and Commerce. April 6, 1948.

  2. Government of India. “Industrial Policy Resolution, 1956.” Ministry of Industry, April 30, 1956. Schedule A reserved 17 industries exclusively for the state, including iron/steel and mining of key minerals.

  3. Firth, John and Ernest Liu. “Manufacturing Underdevelopment: India’s Freight Equalization Scheme, and the Long-run Effects of Distortions on the Geography of Production.” Cornell University, Barrett-Dyson Working Paper. https://barrett.dyson.cornell.edu/NEUDC/paper_316.pdf

  4. “Hirakud Dam.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirakud_Dam

  5. “Mahanadi Valley Development Hirakud Dam Project.” Central Water Commission. https://cwc.gov.in/sites/default/files/hirakud.pdf

  6. “Development, Displacement and Justice in India: Study of Hirakud Dam.” ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311736290

  7. World Bank Dam Rehabilitation and Improvement Project: Hirakud RAP. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/979661531725488310/pdf/Hirakud-RAP.pdf

  8. “30,000 farmers demand Hirakud dam water.” Down to Earth, 2007. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/30-000-farmers-demand-hirakud-dam-water-6893

  9. “Hirakud Dam and Plight of Its Oustees.” EPW Engage. https://www.epw.in/engage/article/hirakud-dam-and-plight-its-oustees

  10. “Rourkela Steel Plant.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rourkela_Steel_Plant

  11. “About Rourkela Steel Plant.” SAIL. https://www.sail.co.in/en/plants/about-rourkela-steel-plant

  12. SAIL Financial Results FY22. PIB. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1827904

  13. B.K. Roy Burman. “Social Processes in the Industrialization of Rourkela.” Academia. https://www.academia.edu/52884791

  14. “Impact of industrialization on tribal livelihood: case study of Rourkela.” Academia. https://www.academia.edu/85749489

  15. “Economy of Jamshedpur.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Jamshedpur

  16. Coking Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act, 1972; Coal Mines (Nationalisation) Act, 1973. Government of India.

  17. “Mahanadi Coalfields Limited.” Coal India. https://www.mahanadicoal.in

  18. Mahanadi Coalfields Limited production data 2023-24. Ministry of Coal, Government of India.

  19. NALCO About Us. https://nalcoindia.com/company/about-us/

  20. “National Aluminium Company.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Aluminium_Company

  21. NALCO FY24 results. Alcircle. https://www.alcircle.com/news/nalco-s-fy-2023-24-net-profit-hits-inr-2-060-crore-amid-strong-sales-and-export-growth-112096

  22. NALCO dividend to Government of India FY25. https://nalcoindia.com/pre-rel/nalco-pays-rs-988-88-crore-as-dividend-to-government-of-india-for-fy-2024-25/

  23. NALCO Pottangi opposition. Alcircle, 2024. https://www.alcircle.com/news/nalco-faces-growing-tribal-opposition-over-pottangi-bauxite-mines-in-koraput-odisha-116858

  24. “Freight equalisation policy.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freight_equalisation_policy

  25. “Eastern states of India suffered in past due to Freight Policy; now engine of growth: FM Sitharaman.” India Shipping News. https://indiashippingnews.com/eastern-states-of-india-suffered-in-past-due-to-freight-policy-now-engine-of-growth-fm-sitaraman/

  26. National Mineral Policy, 1993. Ministry of Mines, Government of India.

  27. Felix Padel and Samarendra Das. Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel. Orient BlackSwan, 2010.

  28. Pulin B. Nayak, Santosh C. Panda, Prasanta K. Pattanaik (eds). The Economy of Odisha: A Profile. Oxford University Press, 2016.

  29. “Eastern India’s largest auto cluster seeks to emerge from Tata shadow.” Business Standard, 2024.

  30. POSCO establishment and ecosystem architecture. K-Developedia, KDI School. https://www.kdevelopedia.org/Development-Overview/all/establishment-posco—201412070000355.do