Chapter 4: The Skilled Departure

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On a winter morning in December 2024, the placement office at NIT Rourkela posted a number that the institute’s public relations team would repeat for months: Rs 62.44 lakh per annum. The highest package in the 2024-25 placement season. A Computer Science student, identity undisclosed as is convention, had been offered this salary by one of the 373 companies that visited the campus that year — Google, Amazon, Qualcomm, AMD, DE Shaw, Texas Instruments, American Express. Eighty-five students secured CTCs above Rs 30 lakh. The average BTech salary came in at Rs 14.10 lakh. The placement rate hit 82.20 percent, with 1,274 job offers and 509 internships dispensed across the graduating class.

NIT Rourkela celebrated. The numbers are legitimately impressive for a campus in a steel town in western Odisha, surrounded by sal forests and tribal settlements, where the nearest international airport is three hours away in Bhubaneswar. The institute, established in 1961 as the Regional Engineering College alongside Rourkela Steel Plant — both gifts of the Nehruvian industrial vision — has become one of India’s better engineering schools. Its alumni network spans the Indian technology industry. Its research output is respectable. Its placement record, year over year, puts it in the upper tier of NITs nationally.

But here is the number nobody at the placement office will volunteer: of those 1,274 job offers, how many placed graduates in Odisha?

The answer is knowable in principle — the data exists in the placement records — but the institute does not publish destination breakdowns. It does not need to. Anyone who has attended an engineering college in India knows. The highest packages go to Bangalore. Then Hyderabad. Then Pune and Mumbai. Then Delhi NCR. The few who stay in Odisha go to TCS Bhubaneswar or Infosys Bhubaneswar — offices that function, for many ambitious graduates, as a two-year stepping stone before a transfer to a larger city. The Rs 62.44 lakh package did not land in Rourkela. It did not land in Bhubaneswar. It landed, with near certainty, in Bangalore or Hyderabad or possibly the United States.

This is the skilled departure. It does not arrive in camera frame the way the dadan road does. Nobody photographs NIT Rourkela graduates boarding flights at Jharsuguda airport. There are no rescue operations, no NGO reports, no legislative task forces. The skilled departure is voluntary, well-compensated, and socially celebrated. Parents in Cuttack boast about sons in Bangalore the way parents in Ganjam used to boast about sons who cleared the civil service exam. The NIT Rourkela graduate earning Rs 62 lakh in Bangalore is a success story. The KIIT student who placed at Rs 53 lakh — another success story. The IIT Bhubaneswar graduate whose highest package came in at Rs 67.6 lakh — still another.

Success stories, every one. But read them from the perspective of the state that funded the education — the state that built the campus, subsidized the fees, maintained the hostel, paid the professors — and the celebration curdles into something more complicated. Odisha trained them. Odisha educated them. And then Odisha watched them leave.

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The Engineering Pipeline

The numbers across Odisha’s engineering colleges tell the same story with slight variations in decimal points.

KIIT University, Bhubaneswar — private, founded 1992, now one of India’s largest technical universities — reported 5,585 offers in 2024 from over 700 visiting companies. Highest package: Rs 53 lakh. Average BTech salary: Rs 8.50 lakh. Placement rate: 83.06 percent. Top recruiters: Amazon, DE Shaw, McKinsey, Salesforce, Dell Technologies, Deloitte. Where are these companies headquartered? Not Bhubaneswar.

VSSUT Sambalpur — the state’s second NIT equivalent, in western Odisha — managed 639 offers from 76 recruiters in 2025. Highest package: Rs 24 lakh. Median: Rs 6.38 lakh. The top recruiters — Amazon, JP Morgan, UBS, Maruti Suzuki, Cummins — are headquartered in Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Gurgaon. The few Odisha-based companies recruiting at VSSUT offer the lower end of the salary distribution.

IIT Bhubaneswar — established in 2008, the newest IIT and theoretically the jewel of Odisha’s technical education — placed 254 BTech students with a 90.07 percent placement rate in 2025. Highest package: Rs 67.6 lakh. The institute is located on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar, in Argul, with a campus that is still being built. Its graduates, like those from every other IIT in India, scatter to wherever the highest salary beckons. A 2023 NBER study found that 36 percent of the top 1,000 JEE rankers eventually moved abroad. Among the top 100, that figure was 62 percent. In the 1990s, it reached 70 percent.

The engineering pipeline works like this: Odisha’s government (through NIT Rourkela, VSSUT, and IIT Bhubaneswar) and its private sector (through KIIT, SOA, and dozens of smaller colleges) invest in producing technically skilled graduates. The companies that employ these graduates are headquartered outside Odisha. The graduates move to where the companies are. The economic output of their careers — the code they write, the products they build, the tax they pay, the consumer spending they do — accrues to Karnataka, Telangana, Maharashtra, Delhi, or a foreign country. Odisha retains the cost. The destination captures the value.

This is not unique to Odisha. It is the universal pattern of brain drain, observed from rural Appalachia to eastern Germany to every developing country that sends engineers to Silicon Valley. But the pattern has a specific Odia flavor, because it sits atop a state that also loses unskilled labor through the dadan road and semi-skilled labor through the Surat corridor. The skilled departure is the third stream in a triple hemorrhage. And unlike the first two, it drains the people who might have built the economy that would stop the bleeding.

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Six Lakh Odias in Bangalore

The estimate has been repeated enough to become canonical, though its provenance is uncertain: approximately six lakh Odias live in Bangalore as of 2016, making it the largest concentration of Odia professionals outside Odisha. The number has almost certainly grown since, but nobody has updated the count.

Unlike the Odia community in Surat — hundreds of thousands of powerloom workers living in rooms by the looms with no formal community organization documented in research — the Odia community in Bangalore is organized, visible, and culturally active. Odia Samaj Bengaluru runs social and cultural events. The Odisha Puja Committee coordinates Durga Puja celebrations. The Orissa Cultural Association, one of the oldest such organizations, conducts children’s programs on Utkal Diwas. Juhar Parivar Bangalore’s 25th Nuakhai Mahotsav drew over 10,000 attendees at KTPO, Whitefield — a scale of gathering that would be noteworthy for any diaspora community in any Indian city.

The Odia Bangalorean Instagram account connects the community through cultural content and nostalgia posts. Quora discussions about “What do Bangaloreans think about Odias?” yield generally warm responses: hardworking, culturally rooted, well-organized. The IT professional class. The people who made it.

But the structural dynamic is the same as the dadan road, just dressed in business casual. Odisha’s public education system — from government schools in Cuttack and Balasore to coaching centers in Bhubaneswar to NIT Rourkela and IIT Bhubaneswar — produces engineers. Karnataka’s IT ecosystem employs them. The investment in human capital is made in one state. The return on that investment is realized in another.

There is a concept in economics called “fiscal externality” — when one jurisdiction bears the cost of producing a public good while another jurisdiction captures the benefit. It is most commonly applied to infrastructure: a state builds a highway, but the trucks that use it are registered elsewhere and pay taxes elsewhere. The Odia brain drain is a fiscal externality of a different kind. The public good is an educated person. The cost is borne by Odisha’s exchequer — through subsidized seats at NIT Rourkela (annual fees around Rs 1.5-2 lakh against an actual cost of education many times higher), through state government scholarships, through the entire public education apparatus from primary school onward. The benefit is captured by Bangalore’s tax base, Bangalore’s consumer economy, Bangalore’s real estate market, Bangalore’s innovation ecosystem.

Nobody sends a check back to NIT Rourkela for services rendered.

The six lakh Odias in Bangalore are not, of course, all NIT graduates. Many came through the general IT recruitment pipeline — B.Tech from any decent college, campus placement or off-campus hire at TCS or Infosys or Wipro, initial posting that might be Bhubaneswar or Chennai or Kolkata, then a transfer or job switch that lands them in Bangalore. The pipeline is well-worn. The Odia community in Bangalore has been growing since the IT boom of the late 2000s, and the growth has accelerated as Bangalore has cemented its position as India’s undisputed technology capital.

The Bangalore Odia’s emotional relationship to home is qualitatively different from the Surat migrant’s. The Surat powerloom worker sends money home from necessity, visits during Nuakhai if the loom owner permits, and would return permanently if comparable wages existed in Ganjam. The Bangalore IT professional sends money home from generosity (parents, family events, charitable donations), visits during Durga Puja because the office grants leave, and discusses returning to Bhubaneswar in the same wistful, never-quite-executed way that New York professionals discuss moving to Vermont. The desire is real. The execution requires a sacrifice of career trajectory that few are willing to make.

One Quora user captured the dilemma with accidental precision: Bhubaneswar has a growing IT sector, more than 200 firms including TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Tech Mahindra, Mindtree, and Capgemini. Infocity SEZ on 145 acres and Info Valley SEZ on 262 acres are operational. But the specialized high-paying roles — the ones that pay Rs 30 lakh and above — remain concentrated in Bangalore and Hyderabad. Moving to Bhubaneswar means accepting a salary cut, a narrower career path, and an ecosystem that is still being built rather than one that is already built.

This is the honest assessment. Bhubaneswar is improving. It is not yet competitive. And for ambitious professionals optimizing for career growth, “improving” is not a sufficient argument when “already competitive” exists three hours away by flight.

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The Bhubaneswar IT Sector: Better Than Nothing, Not Enough

Bhubaneswar’s claim to be a technology destination is not empty. Over 200 IT companies now operate in the city. TCS runs a large development center. Infosys has a campus. Wipro, Tech Mahindra, Mindtree, Capgemini, and Deloitte have offices. The state government has built Infocity SEZ (145.91 acres) and Info Valley SEZ (262 acres). An upcoming Technocity project promises more space. The state was pitching itself as the “Silicon Coast of India” as recently as 2024, and the phrase is not entirely laughable — the IT sector in Bhubaneswar has grown from nearly nothing in the early 2000s to a meaningful employer in the mid-2020s.

But context demolishes the pitch. India’s startup ecosystem rankings place Bhubaneswar roughly 454th globally and 18th within India. That 18th position means it trails not just Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, and Chennai, but also cities like Jaipur, Kochi, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, and Chandigarh. The IT offices in Bhubaneswar are, for the most part, back-office operations and support centers, not product development hubs or research labs. The engineers who work there tend to be mid-career professionals who chose Bhubaneswar for family reasons or cost-of-living advantages, or fresh graduates using the posting as a stepping stone before transferring.

The salary differential tells the story. A mid-level software engineer in Bangalore might earn Rs 18-25 lakh. The same role in Bhubaneswar, if it exists at all, pays Rs 8-14 lakh. The gap is not primarily about cost-of-living differences (Bhubaneswar is cheaper, but not half as cheap). The gap is about ecosystem depth. In Bangalore, if you leave one company, there are fifty others within a ten-kilometer radius that might hire you for a raise. In Bhubaneswar, your options are narrower. This constrains both absolute salary levels and career velocity — the rate at which your compensation grows over time. For a 25-year-old optimizing for lifetime earnings and career opportunity, the math overwhelmingly favors Bangalore.

The Bhubaneswar IT sector functions, in this light, as a partial retention mechanism. It keeps some engineers in Odisha who would otherwise have left entirely. It provides a fallback for professionals who want to return later in their careers — typically when aging parents need care, when children reach school age, or when the Bangalore traffic and apartment prices finally become intolerable. It is better than nothing. It is not enough to reverse the flow.

What would “enough” look like? Not just more offices of the same kind. The cities that retain technical talent — Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune — have something Bhubaneswar lacks: a self-reinforcing ecosystem. Engineers attract startups. Startups attract venture capital. Venture capital attracts more engineers. The density of technical talent creates networking effects, knowledge spillovers, a labor market deep enough that people can build entire careers without leaving. Bhubaneswar has not yet reached the threshold density where this feedback loop kicks in. It may be approaching it. But “approaching” means years, and every year of approach is another year in which a graduating class at NIT Rourkela places overwhelmingly outside the state.

The honest framing is this: Bhubaneswar’s IT sector is a necessary condition for retaining skilled talent, but it is far from a sufficient one. The ecosystem requires not just office space but career depth, peer quality, startup culture, venture funding, urban amenities, spouse employment opportunities, quality schools, reliable infrastructure, and the intangible sense that this is a place where ambitious things are being built. Bhubaneswar has some of these. It does not have enough of them. And the gap between “some” and “enough” is where the skilled departure lives.

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The Medical Drain

SCB Medical College in Cuttack, founded in 1944, is the oldest medical school in Odisha and one of the oldest in eastern India. MKCG Medical College in Berhampur serves southern Odisha. VIMSAR in Burla covers the west. AIIMS Bhubaneswar, established in 2012, was supposed to be the flagship — a central government institution that would anchor medical education and research in the state. Across 15 government medical colleges, Odisha offers approximately 1,725 MBBS seats annually.

Where do these doctors go after graduation?

No systematic study tracks the migration patterns of Odisha’s medical graduates. This absence of data is itself a data point — it suggests that nobody in the state’s health administration considers the question important enough to measure. What exists is anecdotal evidence, consistent and directionally clear even if imprecise in magnitude: a significant proportion of doctors trained in Odisha leave for better-equipped hospitals, higher pay, and more advanced specialization opportunities in metropolitan India.

The pull factors are overwhelming. A specialist in Bangalore or Delhi can earn three to five times what the same specialist earns at a district hospital in Odisha. The equipment is better. The case diversity is richer. The professional community is larger. Post-graduation — MD, MS, DM, MCh — increasingly requires clearing NEET-PG and competing for seats at AIIMS Delhi, JIPMER, CMC Vellore, or private medical colleges in Karnataka and Maharashtra. Once trained as a specialist in Bangalore, the incentive to return to a district hospital in Mayurbhanj that lacks a functioning MRI machine is precisely zero.

The national figures are staggering: over 60,000 doctors and 75,000 engineers leave India annually. Odisha’s share of this exodus is not separately tracked, but the state’s healthcare infrastructure suggests it cannot afford to lose many. The healthcare bed gap stands at over two lakh. Diagnostic centers are short by 4,432. In rural Odisha, 54 percent of people seeking healthcare choose private providers because public facilities have “inconvenient locations, lower stocks, lack of respect from providers, poorer infrastructure” — these are the words of a BMC Geriatrics study, not a political pamphlet.

The medical brain drain creates a vicious cycle. Hospitals in Odisha are under-equipped, so doctors leave. Because doctors leave, hospitals cannot attract the specialists needed to upgrade. Because hospitals cannot upgrade, patients who can afford it travel to Hyderabad or Vellore for treatment, draining healthcare spending from the state. Because healthcare spending drains, hospital revenues fall, equipment procurement stalls, and more doctors leave. The cycle is textbook — any systems engineer would recognize it as a reinforcing feedback loop, each turn of the wheel accelerating the next.

What would break it is not sentiment but infrastructure: equipment that works, salaries that compete, a research environment that gives ambitious doctors reasons to stay, and housing and schools and urban life in Cuttack or Bhubaneswar that do not feel like a professional exile compared to Bangalore. Odisha is not there yet. We do not know how far from “there” it is, because nobody is measuring.

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The Civil Services Drain

Here is an irony sharp enough to cut: Odisha, a state that desperately needs administrative capacity, cannot fill its own civil service positions.

As of 2024-25, the Odisha cadre had 42 IAS positions vacant, 67 IPS positions vacant, and 66 IFS positions vacant. That is 175 senior administrative, police, and forest service posts — each one a slot that represents district-level leadership, policy implementation capacity, institutional memory — sitting empty. The sanctioned strength is 248 IAS, 195 IPS, and 141 IFS officers. The vacancy rate is severe.

But the vacancies are only half the story. Of the IAS officers who are nominally on the Odisha cadre — meaning they were allocated to the state and are supposed to serve there — 27 are on central deputation. Add 28 IPS and 7 IFS on central deputation, and you get 62 officers who belong to the Odisha cadre but are serving in Delhi, in central ministries, in commissions and tribunals and regulatory bodies. They have chosen, through the deputation mechanism, to serve in the national capital rather than in the state to which they were allocated.

Central deputation is legal, common, and in some ways essential — the central government needs experienced state cadre officers, and officers benefit from the exposure. But the pattern of deputation from Odisha reveals something structural. When 27 of your IAS officers prefer to be in Delhi rather than Bhubaneswar, the preference is not random. Delhi offers better housing, better schools for children, exposure to national-level policy, proximity to power, and a professional environment that most state capitals cannot match. For an ambitious bureaucrat, Bhubaneswar is a hardship posting in all but name.

The consequences are concrete. Districts with vacant Collector posts operate with additional-charge arrangements — one officer managing two or three districts, each getting a fraction of the attention it needs. Policy implementation suffers because the people responsible for implementing it are either absent or overstretched. Institutional memory — the kind that comes from an officer spending consecutive years in a state, understanding its specific challenges, building relationships with local institutions — is destroyed when officers rotate through Odisha as briefly as regulations permit before seeking a deputation to Delhi.

Think of it in terms of a startup that cannot retain senior engineers. The startup has the funding. It has the product idea. It has the market. But every engineer it hires works for eighteen months, learns the codebase, and then leaves for a larger company. The startup is permanently in onboarding mode, perpetually losing the people who know how things work, perpetually training replacements who will themselves leave. The codebase becomes a mess. The product stagnates. Not because the engineers are bad — they are quite good, which is exactly why they leave — but because the organization cannot retain the talent it needs to execute.

Odisha’s bureaucratic drain is this startup scenario at state scale. The officers are competent. The state needs them. They prefer to be elsewhere. And unlike a startup, the state cannot offer stock options or a foosball table to change their minds.

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The Academic Drain

In the previous series on Kalinga’s maritime connections, a detail emerged that illuminates this problem from a different angle: Utkal University’s Southeast Asian Studies program was discontinued for lack of qualified faculty. An area of research with direct relevance to Odisha’s strategic interests — trade with ASEAN, the Kalinga-Southeast Asia civilizational connection, cultural diplomacy — was abandoned because the university could not attract or retain scholars in the field.

This is not an isolated case. Odisha’s government universities regularly advertise for guest and temporary faculty positions — a pattern that signals chronic difficulty filling permanent roles. OUTR (Odisha University of Technology and Research, the renamed College of Engineering and Technology in Bhubaneswar) has held multiple recruitment drives for Assistant Professors, Associate Professors, and Professors. The fact that these drives must be repeated suggests that either the applicant pool is thin or the offers are not competitive enough to convert applications into acceptances.

No systematic study quantifies the scale of faculty departures from Odisha’s universities. But the dynamics are consistent with broader Indian trends: scholars trained at Odisha’s universities pursue PhDs at better-funded institutions in Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, or abroad; upon completion, they are recruited by those same institutions or their peers, at salaries and with research infrastructure that Odisha’s universities cannot match. The scholarly equivalent of the NIT Rourkela placement pattern — educated in Odisha, employed elsewhere.

The consequence is a degradation loop. Universities with thin faculty produce fewer high-quality researchers. Fewer researchers mean less research funding, fewer publications, lower rankings. Lower rankings make it harder to attract both students and faculty. The university becomes a place people pass through rather than build careers at. Students who might have stayed for graduate studies leave for JNU or IITs or universities abroad. The academic ecosystem thins further.

This matters for more than abstract reasons. A state’s universities are, in principle, the institutions that study that state’s specific challenges — its water table, its crop yields, its tribal economies, its mineral policy, its health outcomes, its migration patterns. When the people best equipped to study these challenges are employed at universities in other states, the knowledge production that would inform state policy does not happen. Odisha’s migration crisis, for instance, was not comprehensively surveyed until the Odisha Migration Survey of 2023, conducted by IIT Hyderabad — an institution in another state. The irony is structural: Odisha’s own universities lacked the research capacity to study Odisha’s most pressing social phenomenon.

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The Gulf Road

Not all of Odisha’s skilled migration flows toward Bangalore. A distinct corridor runs from northern Odisha — primarily Balasore, Cuttack, and Bhadrak districts — to the Gulf states: UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait. This is a different migration stream with different economics, different demographics, and a different relationship to home.

The Gulf corridor accelerated during the construction boom of the late 2000s and peaked during Qatar’s FIFA World Cup infrastructure buildup. Approximately 2,500 plumbers from Kendrapada district worked on Qatar’s stadiums and related sanitary infrastructure, employed by firms like HBK Engineering, Trident, and L&T. These were not unskilled laborers. Kendrapada’s plumbers represent one of the most distinctive skilled-migration stories in India.

The district has produced an estimated 100,000 plumbers — one lakh people from a single district, working in a single trade, spread across India and the Gulf. The villages of Pattamundai, Aul, Rajkanika, and Rajnagar blocks are the epicenter. Almost every household has at least one member in the plumbing trade. The State Institute of Plumbing Technology (SIPT) in Pattamundai is the only plumbing-dedicated training institute in India. Earnings range from Rs 30,000 to Rs 1 lakh per month in Indian cities, and Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh in the Gulf. Kendrapada plumbers worked on India’s new Parliament building and convention centers in Delhi. They built the sanitary infrastructure of Lusail Stadium, where Argentina beat France in the 2022 World Cup final.

This is skilled migration in the purest sense: a community that identified a market niche, developed training infrastructure, and built a reputation through quality of work. The Kendrapada plumber is not a bonded laborer. He is a freelance professional with portable skills, global demand, and earnings that place him firmly in the lower-middle or middle class. The remittances flowing back to Kendrapada are significant, if unquantified in aggregate.

But the structural logic is unchanged. Kendrapada invested in producing skilled plumbers. Qatar employed them. Delhi employed them. Oman employed them. The skills were developed in Odisha. The infrastructure they built — stadiums, parliaments, convention centers — belongs to other places. The plumber returns with money but the building stays where it was built.

The broader Gulf migration from Odisha involves IT professionals, construction workers, and other skilled trades from northern Odisha districts. No reliable aggregate exists for the number of Odias in Gulf countries — India-wide, approximately nine million Indians live in GCC states (3.41 million in UAE, 2.59 million in Saudi Arabia, 1.02 million in Kuwait, 740,000 in Qatar), but Odisha’s share is not separately tracked. Unlike Kerala, whose Gulf migration is the gold standard of organized Indian diaspora activity — with 2.12 million Keralites abroad, systematic migration surveys since 1998, formal returnee packages, and remittances constituting 22-28 percent of state GDP — Odisha has no institutional infrastructure for managing its international migration.

This comparison with Kerala is not a rhetorical device. It is a policy failure measurement. Kerala treats its Gulf diaspora as a strategic asset. It counts them, surveys them, supports them, and captures the economic benefits of their migration through formal remittance channels and returnee programs. Odisha does not know how many of its citizens are in the Gulf. It has no returnee policy. It has no migration data infrastructure. The difference is not cultural. It is institutional.

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The Merchant Marine

At Paradip Port, Odisha Maritime Academy has been training merchant navy cadets since 1993. Founded by Padmabhushan Ramakanta Rath with support from Chief Minister Biju Patnaik, it was the first maritime academy to conduct General Purpose Rating courses on a regular basis in India. Capacity: 40 students at a time, with 50 percent seats reserved for Odia candidates and a Rs 15,000 fee rebate for Odisha applicants.

Forty seats. For a state with 480 kilometers of coastline, a maritime tradition stretching back two millennia to the sadhabas who sailed to Bali and Java, and a port at Paradip that handles over 100 million tonnes of cargo annually. The Merchant Navy Association of Odisha (MNAO) organizes professionally, but the pipeline from Odisha into the global merchant marine is a trickle, not a flow.

The historical resonance is hard to ignore. Every Kartik Purnima, Odias launch palm-leaf boats and sing “Aa ka ma boi, pan gua thoi” — the farewell chant to the ancient Sadhaba traders who sailed the monsoon routes to Southeast Asia. The Boita Bandana ceremony is Odisha’s most direct cultural connection to its maritime past. Yet the state produces 40 merchant navy cadets per year from a single institution that is, as of recent reports, set to be taken over by the Adani group. The gap between ceremonial memory and institutional investment could not be wider.

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The International Diaspora

Beyond the Gulf, Odias are scattered across the developed world in patterns that mirror broader Indian professional migration but are almost entirely unquantified.

The Odisha Society of the Americas (OSA), incorporated in 1981 in Tennessee, has approximately 20 regional chapters across the United States and Canada, over 1,000 member families, and an annual convention held on the July 4th weekend that draws several thousand attendees. The 56th Annual Convention was held in 2025. OSA publishes through its Medium account (@OSAImpact), positioning itself as a bridge between the diaspora and Odisha’s development needs.

The Odisha Society of Canada (CANOSA), OSI in Ireland, OSUK in the United Kingdom, and the Odia Society of Singapore round out the formal organizational landscape. The UK migration is the oldest, recorded since 1935 from Balasore (then in undivided Bengal province). Australia has drawn Odias from Balasore, Sambalpur, and Cuttack since before 1980, with software engineers from various districts arriving after 2000.

The economics of international diaspora are entirely different from the Surat corridor or even the Bangalore IT stream. These are permanent emigrants who have built professional careers — doctors, engineers, academics, entrepreneurs — in countries where the per capita income is ten to fifty times India’s. They hold US green cards or British citizenship or Australian permanent residency. Their children often speak little or no Odia. Their connection to Odisha is maintained through annual or biennial visits, festival celebrations, Facebook groups, WhatsApp chains, and the occasional charitable donation.

The NRI diaspora’s potential as an economic force for Odisha is often discussed and almost never realized. The state established an NRO (Non-Resident Odia) Cell in the office of the Chief Resident Commissioner in New Delhi, working as a liaison between the government and the global diaspora through a “Public-Private-People-Partnership” model. The cell exists. Its impact on Odisha’s economy is, charitably, unmeasurable.

Compare this with what the Gujarati diaspora has done for Gujarat, or the Keralite diaspora for Kerala. The Gujarati model is entrepreneurial — diaspora capital flows back into business ventures, establishing a feedback loop between emigration and economic development. The Kerala model is remittance-based — the state has built formal channels to capture and direct diaspora earnings. The Odia model is neither. The diaspora sends remittances informally, organizes culturally, and engages economically with home only at the margins.

There are structural reasons for this. Gujarat and Kerala have stronger institutional frameworks for diaspora engagement. Their diaspora populations are larger and more concentrated. Their state governments have decades of experience courting diaspora investment. Odisha’s NRO Cell is a recent and modest effort. But the structural reasons do not excuse the outcome. They explain it. The outcome is that Odisha’s international diaspora — a population of significant human capital and financial resources, the product of Odisha’s educational investment — contributes less to the state’s development than diaspora populations from states with comparable or smaller emigration histories.

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The Difference from Dadan

It is worth pausing to state what might seem obvious but is routinely elided in public discourse: the skilled departure and the dadan road are not the same phenomenon. Nobody exploits the NIT Rourkela graduate. Nobody holds the KIIT placement student in debt bondage. The IT professional in Bangalore chose to be there, had multiple offers, and can leave whenever she wants. The plumber in Qatar is earning multiples of what he would earn in Kendrapada and will return with savings that transform his family’s economic position. The doctor who moves to Hyderabad is not a victim. She is an optimizer.

This distinction matters because conflating voluntary, well-compensated professional migration with coerced, exploitative labor migration is analytically dishonest. The moral urgency is different. The policy response should be different. The emotional register is different. The brick kiln worker in Andhra Pradesh whose hands were chopped off for refusing to work and the software engineer in Bangalore deciding between a Google offer and an Amazon offer are not on the same spectrum of anything. They are experiencing fundamentally different relationships with migration.

And yet.

The structural effect on the source state is, if not identical, then disturbingly parallel. Both streams drain Odisha of human capital that was expensive to produce and would be valuable to retain. The state subsidizes education at every level — from the primary school in a village in Koraput to the IIT in Bhubaneswar. The subsidy is an investment. The return on the investment — the economic productivity of the educated person — is captured by whoever employs them. When the employer is in Bangalore or Hyderabad or the United States, the return accrues elsewhere.

A nation-state can rationalize this: the IIT graduate in Bangalore still pays taxes to the Indian government, still contributes to the national GDP, still works within the same sovereign economy. From a national perspective, internal migration is reallocation, not loss. But from a state perspective — and Odisha is a state, not a nation, competing with other states for investment, talent, and fiscal resources — the brain drain is a subsidy flowing from a poorer state to richer ones. Karnataka did not pay for the NIT Rourkela graduate’s education. Karnataka benefits from his productivity. Odisha paid. Odisha does not.

This is the economic logic of the skilled departure, stripped of sentiment. It is a fiscal transfer from the poor to the rich, mediated not by taxation or policy but by the labor market. And it is, in aggregate, probably more damaging than the dadan stream in terms of its long-run impact on the state’s development trajectory — because the people leaving are the ones with the highest potential to build the industries, institutions, and ecosystems that would generate employment for the millions who leave through the other two streams.

The plumber who builds Qatar’s stadium, the software engineer who builds Bangalore’s app, and the brick kiln worker who builds Andhra’s houses are all, in their different ways, building somewhere that is not home. The difference is that the plumber and the engineer had a choice. The brick kiln worker, mostly, did not. But the buildings rise elsewhere regardless.

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What Would Retain Them

The question of retention is asked often and answered badly. The standard answer — “Odisha needs to create more jobs” — is true but vacuous. It is like telling a sick person that what they need is to be healthy. The useful question is: what specific conditions would a mid-career software engineer in Bangalore require to consider moving to Bhubaneswar?

The obvious answer is pay parity. But pay parity is necessary and insufficient. An engineer earning Rs 25 lakh in Bangalore will not move to Bhubaneswar for Rs 25 lakh alone, because salary is only one input to the career optimization equation.

What the engineer also needs:

Career growth trajectory. In Bangalore, the path from senior engineer to tech lead to engineering manager to VP is visible and well-trodden. Hundreds of companies offer each rung. In Bhubaneswar, the ladder is shorter and narrower. If your current company does not promote you, your options for switching to a competitor at a higher level are limited. The density of the labor market matters.

Peer quality. Engineers learn from other engineers. The quality of your colleagues shapes the quality of your work and, by extension, your professional growth. Bangalore’s engineering talent pool is the deepest in India. Bhubaneswar’s is not. This is a self-reinforcing dynamic: good engineers attract good engineers, and the absence of good engineers repels them.

Spouse employment. In dual-income professional households — which describes most of the demographic we are discussing — both partners need viable careers. If one partner is in IT and the other is in marketing or finance or healthcare, Bhubaneswar must offer both of them opportunities. A city that can employ the engineer but not the spouse loses the household.

Urban amenities. Schools for children, healthcare for parents, restaurants, cultural life, domestic travel connectivity. Bhubaneswar has improved on all of these dimensions, but the comparison is still unfavorable. A professional who has lived in Bangalore with its multiplexes, craft breweries, weekend destinations, and international airport will find Bhubaneswar’s amenity landscape thinner. This sounds frivolous. It is not. People make life-altering decisions based on the texture of daily life.

Reliable infrastructure. Power cuts, waterlogging, water shortages — the complaints that recur in every Reddit and Quora thread about living in Bhubaneswar. An IT professional working from home cannot function with unreliable power. A family with young children cannot live with water tanker dependency. Infrastructure is not glamorous, but its absence is disqualifying.

Startup culture and venture ecosystem. The engineers most likely to return are the ones motivated by entrepreneurship — the desire to build something, not just earn a salary. For them, the relevant comparison is not Bangalore’s TCS office versus Bhubaneswar’s TCS office, but Bangalore’s startup ecosystem versus Bhubaneswar’s. Bangalore has over 12,000 startups, hundreds of venture capital firms, a culture of risk-taking and innovation, and a network effect that makes it the obvious place to found a technology company. Bhubaneswar ranks 18th among Indian cities for startups. The gap is not just quantitative. It is qualitative. The ecosystem does not yet exist in Bhubaneswar in a form that would attract serious founders.

The honest assessment is that Bhubaneswar is on a trajectory that could, in ten to fifteen years, make it competitive with Tier-1.5 cities like Pune, Chandigarh, or Kochi for a specific segment of the professional population. It will not, in any foreseeable timeframe, compete with Bangalore or Hyderabad for top-tier talent. The question is not whether Bhubaneswar can become the next Bangalore. It cannot. The question is whether it can become the kind of city where returning to Odisha does not feel like a career sacrifice — where the trade-offs (lower salary, smaller ecosystem) are compensated by advantages (proximity to family, lower cost of living, quality of life, the satisfaction of building something in a growing market).

For the medical professional, the equation is similar but the variables are different. A doctor will return to SCB Medical College if it has modern equipment, competitive pay, a research environment, and the administrative freedom to practice good medicine. These conditions do not currently exist in most of Odisha’s government hospitals.

For the IAS officer, the calculus involves housing, schools, professional prestige, and the practical question of whether the state government provides the political support and institutional environment to do meaningful work. When officers on deputation in Delhi report that they prefer the capital’s environment, they are making a statement about the quality of governance institutions in Bhubaneswar as much as about personal convenience.

We should be honest about what we do not know here. There is no survey of Odia professionals outside the state asking them what would make them return. There is no data on how many have returned and what their experience has been. The COVID-19 reverse migration provided a natural experiment for the working class — and the answer was that most went back to their destination cities within months. For the professional class, no equivalent experiment exists. We are reasoning from first principles and anecdotal evidence, which is better than not reasoning at all but considerably worse than actual data.

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The Quiet Hollowing

The skilled departure does not make headlines. It does not produce the dramatic images of the dadan road — no photographs of families walking on highways, no rescue operations at brick kilns, no legislative debates about bonded labor. It is, by design, invisible. The NIT graduate who takes a Bangalore placement does so privately. The doctor who leaves SCB Medical College does so without fanfare. The IAS officer who files for central deputation does so through bureaucratic channels. The faculty member who accepts an offer from a Delhi university simply stops showing up at Utkal.

This invisibility is precisely what makes the skilled departure so damaging. The dadan road is visible, horrifying, and generates political pressure for response (however inadequate). The Surat corridor was invisible until COVID-19 forced it into public view. But the skilled departure may never generate a crisis moment — because it operates through normal labor market mechanisms, produces outcomes that look like success (high placements! Great packages! Odisha’s sons conquering Bangalore!), and affects people who have the least reason to complain.

The damage is cumulative and delayed. Every year that NIT Rourkela’s best graduates leave, the state loses a potential entrepreneur, a potential employer, a potential institution-builder. Every year that doctors leave SCB and MKCG, the healthcare system loses capacity that compounds over time. Every year that IAS officers choose Delhi, the administrative infrastructure loses institutional knowledge. Every year that faculty leave Utkal and OUTR, the university system loses the scholars who would train the next generation.

Compounding works in reverse as well as forward. When a state loses human capital year after year, the losses compound. The entrepreneur who would have built a company that employed a hundred people — who in turn would have trained and mentored others, creating a secondary wave of talent development — never builds it. The doctor who would have started a specialty practice that attracted other specialists never starts it. The professor who would have mentored the PhD student who would have started the research lab that would have attracted the grant that would have put the university on the map never mentors anyone. Each absence creates a cascade of unrealized possibilities.

This is what makes the skilled departure potentially more damaging than the dadan stream, despite being less morally outrageous. The dadan stream drains people who perform labor that is valuable but replaceable in the destination economy. The skilled departure drains people who are, almost by definition, irreplaceable in the source economy — because they are the ones with the capability to build the institutions, companies, and ecosystems that the source economy desperately needs.

Odisha’s challenge is not just that its people leave. It is that the people who leave last are the ones it can least afford to lose. The dadan worker leaves first, pushed by poverty and pulled by the sardar’s advance. The powerloom worker leaves next, following the Ganjam-to-Surat pipeline that his father and grandfather followed. But the engineer, the doctor, the bureaucrat, the professor — they leave only when it becomes clear that staying means accepting a professional life that is smaller, slower, and less rewarding than what exists elsewhere. Their departure is the final confirmation that the ecosystem has failed. And their absence is the reason it cannot be rebuilt.

The dadan road is Odisha’s wound. The Surat corridor is Odisha’s scar. But the skilled departure is the reason the wound does not heal — because it drains the surgeons, the engineers, the administrators who might have built the operating theatre. Every campus placement season at NIT Rourkela, every IAS allocation list that sends officers elsewhere, every medical graduate who packs for Hyderabad, the state loses a little more of its capacity to become the kind of place where the next generation would not need to leave.

That is the quietest cost of migration. Not the bodies that leave, but the futures that never arrive.

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Sources for this chapter are drawn from the research compilation in reference/the-leaving/odisha-migration-statistics-research.md, reference/the-leaving/odisha-diaspora-social-cultural-research.md, and reference/the-leaving/odia-diaspora-online-discourse-research.md. Key data points: NIT Rourkela placements 2024-25 (Careers360), KIIT placements 2024 (Shiksha), VSSUT placements 2025 (Careers360), IIT Bhubaneswar placements 2025, IAS/IPS/IFS vacancy data (OrissaPOST, Pragativadi), Bhubaneswar IT sector (Business Standard), Kendrapada plumber economy (Down to Earth, The Caravan, OdishaBytes), Odisha Maritime Academy (odishamaritime.com), Gulf migration (Odia diaspora Wikipedia), OSA (odishasociety.org), NBER study on IIT brain drain, NRO Cell (RC Odisha). Medical infrastructure gaps from BMC Geriatrics and government data. Odia diaspora community organizations from multiple sources including Quora discussions and Facebook group documentation. All specific citations referenced in the research documents.