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Chapter 6: The Empty Village

In November 2024, the government of Odisha tracked 94,106 migrant workers departing from the state’s western districts — a 34% increase over the 70,142 recorded the previous year. The tracking was itself a recent innovation. For decades, the departures happened without anyone counting. But even now, with the PAReSHRAM portal and district labor officers and mobile resource centers, the number represents a fraction of the actual exodus. The system captures those who pass through registration points. It does not capture the families who board trucks at three in the morning from Kantabanji, or the women who follow their husbands to construction sites in Hyderabad through informal arrangements no government database will ever see.

To understand what those numbers mean, you have to visit what they leave behind.

Consider a village in Muribahal block, Balangir district. Sargul, population approximately 2,300. Ninety percent of its residents are classified as dadan workers — people who migrate seasonally to brick kilns in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka. Between November and June, Sargul is not a village in any meaningful demographic sense. It is a collection of locked houses, fallow fields, a primary school with a fraction of its enrolled students, and a population composed almost entirely of the elderly, the very young, and women who could not travel.

This is not metaphor. Journalists visiting western Odisha’s migration-prone blocks during the November-to-May season consistently report the same observation: ghost-village conditions. In neighboring Ichhapada panchayat, 80% of residents are dadan workers who leave for the season. Across four high-migration districts — Balangir, Nuapada, Sonepur, and Bargarh — close to 100,000 people are recruited annually by sardars and transported to worksites in other states. The Odisha Migration Survey of 2023, conducted by IIT Hyderabad across 15,000 households in all 30 districts, found that 18 to 31 percent of households in migration-prone blocks had at least one member who had migrated for work outside the state.

What remains, after the departure, is a demographic skeleton. The working-age population — the people who would farm, who would run shops, who would staff the school and the health sub-center, who would maintain irrigation channels and attend gram sabha meetings — is somewhere else. The village continues to exist as a legal entity, a point on the map, a collection of ration cards. But the human infrastructure that makes a village function has been temporarily — and in many cases permanently — exported.

This chapter is about what happens to the place they leave behind.

Women Alone with the Land

Nobody planned the feminization of western Odisha’s agriculture. It was not a policy. It was not a gender empowerment initiative. It was the residual consequence of an economic system that exports men and leaves women to manage whatever remains.

When a husband migrates to a Surat powerloom or a Telangana brick kiln, his wife does not simply take over his share of the household work. She absorbs the entirety of a life’s operational burden. She manages the farm — 75% of major crop production in Odisha is performed by women, 79% of horticulture, 95% of animal husbandry. She manages the children. She manages the household finances, such as they are, including the uncertain receipt of remittances from a husband who may or may not be able to send money regularly. She manages relations with the moneylender. She manages the elderly in-laws who live under the same roof. And she does all of this in a village where the institutional support that might ease any one of these burdens — the functional school, the health sub-center with a present doctor, the bank branch, the responsive panchayat — is degraded precisely because the population decline has made it uneconomical to maintain.

Research on left-behind women in Odisha reveals a consistent pattern. In the Mahanadi delta, male-dominated migration leaves women in what researchers describe as “vulnerable environments facing social and economic challenges having impacts on their empowerment and wellbeing.” In western Odisha, the picture is more acute. The primary causes of psychological stress among left-behind wives are child care burden, farming alone, loneliness, and fear and uncertainty about their husbands’ safety and return.

The data on food insecurity is startling. In one study of women in migrant households in Odisha, 83.5% reported inability to access adequate food. Seventy-eight percent cited this as a major cause of stress. These are not women in households with zero income — many receive remittances. But remittances are irregular, arrive through informal channels, and must stretch across multiple competing needs: the moneylender’s interest, children’s school fees, agricultural inputs, medical expenses, and daily consumption. The woman’s job is to allocate a insufficient sum across an impossible list of demands, with no partner to consult and no institutional backstop if she runs short.

The economic logic is perverse. Higher remittances — from husbands who secured better-paying positions or who have been migrating long enough to command slightly higher wages — do correlate with increased agency for the women left behind. They make more farm decisions, control more household spending, exercise more independence in daily life. But lower remittances — from husbands trapped in the worst of the dadan system, or from husbands whose employers withhold wages until the end of the season — simply add the burden of financial management to the burden of labor, without the compensating resource of additional income. The woman becomes the de facto head of a household that cannot sustain itself.

What gets lost in the statistical language is the texture of the daily experience. In Bhadrak district, on the coast, villages are “mostly dominated by women-run households, with men having migrated to faraway cities in search of work as agriculture becomes increasingly unsustainable with rising land salinity, savage floods, and frequent cyclones.” In villages like Sitalpur, women manage homes, tend children, and look after aged mothers-in-law. The description reads like a division of labor. What it actually describes is a division of life — the husband’s life happening elsewhere, the wife’s life happening in the remains of a place that is losing its capacity to function.

There is a term in development economics for this: the feminization of agriculture. It sounds neutral, almost progressive. It is neither. It describes a situation in which women do more of the hardest work in the economy while receiving less institutional support, less social recognition, and less compensation than the men who previously did it. The women compensate for the loss of male labor as unpaid family workers on the farm, without social recognition. The “feminization” is not empowerment. It is additional labor without additional agency — except for the minority whose husbands earn enough to send meaningful remittances home.

The Children Between

The impossible choice facing migrant families with children is this: leave them behind, or take them along. Both options damage.

When parents leave children with grandparents — the most common arrangement in the dadan migration stream — the result is what demographers call a skipped-generation household. The middle generation is absent. The household consists of people over sixty and people under twelve, with the older members responsible for the younger ones in a context where the older members are themselves becoming less capable, less mobile, and less healthy with each passing year.

The educational consequences are measurable. Odisha’s school dropout rate rose from 12% to 15% in 2024-25. At the secondary level, the number is worse: 27.3%, more than double the national average of 12.6%. Migration is explicitly cited as a major driver. Surveys in high-migration blocks show the mechanism clearly. When families migrate, children miss school — either because they travel with the family or because the grandparent left in charge cannot sustain the daily logistics of school attendance: the uniform, the fees, the homework supervision, the motivation to stay enrolled when the economic signal from the family’s own experience is that education leads nowhere near Balangir.

The children who travel with their families to brick kilns face a different and in some ways more severe disruption. More than 20% of workers rescued from brick kilns between 2011 and 2013 were children. These children do not attend school during the six to eight months their families spend at the kiln. Many of them work — mixing clay, carrying bricks, performing tasks that no labor law in the country permits for anyone under fourteen. “If we do not take our children along, how can we repay?” a bonded laborer explained to researchers, capturing the logic of a system that requires the entire family’s labor to meet production targets.

The education-migration feedback loop is the mechanism by which poverty reproduces itself across generations. Children who drop out due to family migration have lower skills, limiting them to the same informal labor their parents perform. The inter-generational trap closes. A child raised in a skipped-generation household in Nuapada, attending school intermittently, watching their grandfather struggle with farming that does not pay, absorbing the ambient understanding that the only real economic option is to leave — that child is being prepared, structurally if not intentionally, to become the next generation’s migrant. The schooling they miss is the schooling that might have opened an alternative.

I should be honest about what we do not know here. No longitudinal study tracks Odisha’s migration-affected children from childhood through adulthood. We have cross-sectional snapshots: dropout rates, rescue data from brick kilns, NGO reports from specific blocks. We do not have a cohort study that follows the children of Sargul village and measures, twenty years later, where they ended up and what the parental absence cost them in measurable life outcomes. The 27.3% secondary dropout rate is a symptom. The mechanism connecting parental migration to that dropout rate — through grandparent incapacity, economic pressure, motivational erosion, and the sheer logistical difficulty of keeping a child in school when the family’s survival strategy requires geographic mobility — is understood in outline but not quantified in the way it would need to be for serious policy intervention.

What we can say with confidence is that the dropout rate is not a failure of the education system alone. It is a failure of the economic system that makes education feel irrelevant to the lived reality of families whose survival depends on leaving.

Nine Hundred Thousand Hectares

Odisha has approximately 908,000 hectares of agricultural land classified as current fallow — land that is technically arable but is not being cultivated in the current season.

Not all of this is attributable to migration. Fallow land has multiple causes: inadequate irrigation, soil degradation, unprofitable crop economics, land disputes, and the simple reality that small and marginal farmers — who constitute 93% of Odisha’s farming community — often lack the capital, inputs, and market access to make cultivation worthwhile. But in western Odisha’s migration-prone districts, the labor shortage caused by seasonal departure is a significant and compounding factor.

The arithmetic is straightforward. Balangir district has approximately 3% irrigation coverage on its agricultural land. That means 97% of farming depends entirely on monsoon rainfall. The kharif season — roughly June through October — is the only reliable cropping window. Rabi cropping requires irrigation that does not exist. Odisha’s overall cropping intensity is 117%, compared to a national average of 156%, meaning the state’s land produces roughly one crop per year where other states manage one and a half. In migration-heavy districts, even the kharif crop is compromised when the working-age labor has departed by November.

The productivity gap is stark. Odisha’s foodgrain productivity stands at 1,798 kilograms per hectare against a national average of 2,515. The state’s Economic Survey for 2025-26 reports improvement — cropping intensity reaching 165% statewide, foodgrain output hitting 150.5 lakh metric tonnes — but these aggregate figures mask the widening gap between irrigated eastern districts and the rain-dependent west where migration is concentrated.

Here is the vicious cycle, stated plainly. Agriculture fails because of poor irrigation and climate vulnerability. Families cannot survive on one rain-fed crop per year. They leave. The remaining agricultural labor force shrinks. Land that could be farmed — even within the limited kharif window — lies partially fallow because there are not enough hands to work it. Local food production drops. The village becomes more dependent on purchased food, which requires cash, which requires either remittances from distant migrants or more migration. The cycle accelerates.

Think of this in systems terms. A village’s agricultural output is a function of land, water, labor, and inputs. Remove water through inadequate irrigation and you lose the rabi season. Remove labor through migration and you lose a portion of the kharif season too. The remaining two factors — land and inputs — cannot compensate. The land sits there. The inputs sit in the dealer’s shop. The crop that would have grown does not. The family that would have eaten it has already left.

The paradox is precise: people leave because farming does not pay, and farming pays even less when there is nobody to do it. Each departure makes the next departure more likely. The empty field is not just a consequence of migration. It is a cause of further migration. This is a positive feedback loop — using “positive” in the engineering sense, meaning self-reinforcing, not desirable. Left undisturbed, it converges on a stable state where the village is permanently depopulated and the land is permanently fallow.

The Marriage Economy

Migration distorts the marriage market in western Odisha in ways that range from the subtly damaging to the explicitly exploitative.

The most documented distortion is the persistence of child marriage. Over 8,000 child marriage cases were recorded in Odisha in a six-year period through 2025. The connection to migration operates through a specific logic: parents who know they will be absent — working in a distant brick kiln, unavailable for months — arrange marriages for their daughters before departure, “believing it will secure their future and ensure their safety.” The calculation is not irrational, given the premises. A girl in a migration-depleted village, without both parents, with elderly grandparents as nominal guardians, is vulnerable. Marriage, in this framework, is a form of risk management. That it exposes the girl to a different set of risks — early pregnancy, interrupted education, domestic violence in a household she had no power to choose — does not change the logic driving the decision. It reveals the logic’s limitations.

The second distortion is more geographically diffuse. Northern Indian states with skewed sex ratios — the consequence of decades of sex-selective practices — face a deficit of marriageable women. This deficit creates a market. Men from states with excess male populations seek wives from economically marginalized states: Odisha, West Bengal, Assam, Jharkhand. Research on 1,216 “molki” (purchased) brides, including women from Balasore district in Odisha, documents the consequences. These women face “color discrimination, caste discrimination, and judgmental attitudes, leading to social isolation and mental health issues.” They are geographically separated from their natal families, culturally alien in their marital homes, and economically dependent on husbands who acquired them through financial transactions rather than mutual choice.

The term “bride trafficking” carries legal specificity that does not always apply to these transactions. Some are consensual arrangements between families, with the bride’s family accepting a payment that alleviates poverty. Some involve coercion, deception, or both. The boundary between an arranged cross-regional marriage and trafficking can be blurred, and the women involved may not experience the distinction as meaningful. What is unambiguous is the economic driver: migration-related poverty makes families — and women themselves — more vulnerable to marriage arrangements that trade long-term welfare for short-term financial relief.

What I cannot tell you is the precise scale at which migration drives these marriage distortions in Odisha versus other factors. Poverty, patriarchal norms, weak enforcement of minimum age laws, and cultural attitudes toward female autonomy all contribute independently. Migration adds another vector, but quantifying its marginal contribution would require data that does not exist. The honest statement is: migration makes the marriage market worse, in ways that are specific and documented, but the magnitude of that worsening cannot be isolated from the other forces at work.

Aging Without Care

India’s cultural compact between generations is simple in its expectations and increasingly impossible in its execution. Adult children care for aging parents. The joint family provides security in old age. The son who stays in the village, works the family land, and tends to his parents in their declining years is not performing an exceptional act of filial devotion. He is fulfilling the basic social contract.

Migration voids that contract.

When the working-age generation leaves, elderly parents are left in villages with deteriorating services and diminishing social networks. The pattern is documented clearly in Odisha’s case: elderly parents are increasingly living alone, separated from children who migrated for employment. What once provided informal care — collective social rituals, neighborly cooperation, routine human exchange — has steadily weakened as younger generations leave.

The health data is concrete. Among older parents whose adult children have migrated, studies using the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI) data find higher prevalence of depression, poorer self-rated health, and greater functional limitations compared to those with children nearby. In rural Odisha specifically, 54% of elderly people seek private healthcare because public facilities have inconvenient locations, insufficient supplies, lack of respectful treatment from providers, and poor infrastructure. When the person who would accompany an elderly parent to that distant hospital, advocate on their behalf, or arrange transport in an emergency is in Surat or Hyderabad, the healthcare access problem compounds.

The number of elderly in Odisha is projected to rise faster than the national average and surpass that of developed states like Karnataka, with the majority living in rural areas with low per capita income. This is a demographic trajectory moving in the opposite direction from the state’s support capacity. More elderly people, in more rural locations, with fewer working-age family members nearby, in a healthcare infrastructure that is already inadequate.

The structural irony — and it deserves that word — is that the very children who leave to send money home for their parents’ welfare are, by leaving, depriving those parents of the care no money can buy. Remittances improve material conditions. A pucca house replaces a kaccha one. Medical bills get paid, eventually. Festival expenses are covered. But the daily presence — the hand that helps an arthritic parent to the toilet, the voice that talks through a sleepless night, the judgment that recognizes the difference between a passing ailment and something requiring a hospital visit — is absent. The money is a poor substitute for the person.

During Durga Puja or Rath Yatra, when migrants return for a week or two, the village changes. The elderly parent has a son at home. The house fills with noise. Someone fixes the broken gate, replaces the thatching, stocks the pantry. It is the highlight of the year. Then the festival ends, and the son leaves, and the gate stays broken until the next festival, and the parent sits in the quiet house and waits.

The Weight That Has No Name

Four hundred and three migrant workers from Odisha died in other states over the past decade. The figure was reported by the state Labour Minister in an Assembly statement. Ganjam recorded the highest deaths at 59, followed by Kalahandi at 39 and Balangir at 35. The annual average works out to approximately sixty per year — sixty families that receive news of a death in a distant place, a body that must be transported home or cremated far away, a life ended in a brick kiln or a powerloom or a construction site that the family has never seen.

Between 2012 and 2015, in Surat’s registered powerloom units alone, 84 fatal events killed 114 workers and seriously injured 375 others. One loom master from Ganjam told a reporter from the People’s Archive of Rural India that he had conducted 27 funerals in a single year. The dead included workers as young as sixteen (electrocution) and eighteen (fever and dysentery). These are documented deaths in registered units. The unregistered units, where conditions are worse and record-keeping is absent, produce deaths that enter no database.

The mental health dimension of migration — for those who leave and those who stay — is one of the most consequential and least addressed aspects of the phenomenon. The overall prevalence of depression among migrant workers in India is estimated at 38.99%; anxiety at 27.31%. For the migrants themselves, the risk factors are isolation, loneliness, exploitative working conditions, separation from family, and the absence of any formal support system. No mental health infrastructure exists in brick kilns or powerloom sheds. The concept does not apply in those environments. You work, you sleep, you eat, you work again. The twelve-hour shift in a room with 80 to 100 other workers, the noise exceeding 110 decibels (audiometric testing found 95% of Surat powerloom workers showed varying levels of deafness), the six-by-three-foot sleeping space — these are not conditions that produce psychological wellbeing. They are conditions that produce endurance, for as long as endurance lasts.

For the families left behind, the mental health toll operates through different mechanisms but arrives at similar endpoints. The primary stressors for left-behind wives are isolation, uncertainty about their husband’s safety, the dual burden of farm work and childcare, and the anxiety of managing household finances on irregular remittances. During COVID-19, when migrant workers lost their jobs overnight and could not return home for weeks or months, the uncertainty peaked. Families did not know if their migrant member was alive, sick, stranded, or in danger. The phone networks — the fragile digital threads connecting migrant husbands to their families — became lifelines. When those connections broke, the psychological impact was severe.

“Odia women migrants suffer mental stress, feel nobody heeds to their plight,” a 2020 Outlook India headline noted during the pandemic. The headline captured something important, but its framing was misleading. The mental stress did not begin with COVID. COVID revealed what had always been there: a vast, diffuse, undocumented burden of psychological suffering distributed across hundreds of thousands of households where the family is structurally incomplete, the economic situation is precarious, and the emotional support that might buffer against both is absent because it departed on a train to Surat.

What would a mental health intervention look like in this context? The question is almost absurd in its ambition. You would need counselors who speak the local language, who understand the specific stresses of migration-affected households, who can reach villages that a government doctor visits once a month if at all. You would need a mental health system — and Odisha, like most Indian states, does not have a functioning mental health system for its general population, let alone a specialized one for the families of migrants. The honest assessment is that the psychological toll of migration is absorbed privately, by the people who bear it, without institutional recognition or response.

The Dormitory Village

When 40 to 60 percent of a village’s working-age adults are absent for six months or more each year, the village’s economic life does not shrink proportionally. It collapses disproportionally.

An economy is not just a collection of individual incomes. It is a network of transactions. The farmer buys seed from the input dealer. The input dealer buys rice from the farmer’s wife. The rice mill operator employs local labor. The laborer’s children attend the school that employs a teacher who buys vegetables from the market. Each transaction creates another. When you remove the farmer, you do not merely remove his income from the village. You remove a node from the network. Every transaction that passed through that node disappears. The input dealer loses a customer. The rice mill has less grain to process. The market has fewer buyers. The multiplier works in reverse.

In systems thinking, this is a network effect operating in the negative direction. The value of a network is not linear in the number of its nodes — it scales faster than linearly. Remove enough nodes and the network does not just get smaller. It crosses a threshold below which it cannot sustain the functions it previously performed. Below a certain population density, the market cannot support a vegetable seller. Below a slightly higher threshold, the tea shop closes. Below another threshold, the private tutor stops visiting. The village’s economic activity contracts to a level that can be sustained by the remaining population — which is to say, the elderly, the children, and the women who are already stretched beyond capacity.

What remains is what might be called a dormitory village. It is a place where people live, in the sense that they sleep there and store their possessions. It is not a place where economic life happens in any generative sense. The productive economy has been exported along with the workers. The village exists as a node in a remittance distribution network — money arrives from Surat, from Hyderabad, from the brick kiln’s end-of-season settlement — and is consumed locally for food, school fees, medical expenses, and loan repayment. But the money does not circulate within the village economy in a way that creates employment, builds assets, or generates further transactions. It arrives and is spent. It does not multiply.

This is the difference between an economy and a distribution channel. An economy transforms inputs into outputs, creating value at each step. A distribution channel moves money from one point to another. The dormitory village has become the latter. Its residents consume but do not produce. They receive but do not generate. The village’s function in the economic system has been reduced to receiving remittances and providing a return address for workers who are generating value somewhere else.

The physical evidence is visible. Houses built with remittance money — pucca construction replacing kaccha, a second story, a television dish on the roof. Motorcycles and auto-rickshaws parked outside homes whose owners are absent. A village that looks prosperous from its buildings but is empty of the people who paid for them. The prosperity is real but imported. It does not reflect local economic activity. It reflects the wages earned in a distant city, transmitted home, and materialized in concrete and steel.

The Festival Village

There is one week each year when the village is whole again.

During Durga Puja in October or Nuakhai in August-September, the migrants return. Not all of them — the brick kiln workers who left in November may not be permitted to return before June, and the powerloom workers in Surat risk losing their positions if they take too many days off. But enough come back that the village transforms.

The streets are full. The temple is crowded. The shops that subsist on reduced trade for ten months suddenly have customers. The school has faces in it that it has not seen since the last festival. The elderly parent has a son at home, a daughter-in-law to help with cooking, grandchildren running through the house. The panchayat meeting has quorum. The football match can field full teams. For a few days, the village operates as a village is supposed to operate — as a community of people who live together, trade with each other, argue with each other, celebrate together.

Nuakhai, the harvest festival of western Odisha, is the emotional center of this annual cycle. It is the festival of the new rice, celebrated on the day after Ganesh Chaturthi, and for the people of Balangir and Bargarh and Sonepur, it is the festival that defines the year. Sardars time their recruitment visits to coincide with Nuakhai — the advance payment they offer is calibrated to arrive when families need cash for festival expenses. Workers try to be home for Nuakhai even when every other festival is missed. Ten thousand people attend the Nuakhai celebration organized by the Odia community in Bangalore, recreating the festival 1,500 kilometers from where it belongs.

Then Nuakhai ends, and the departure begins again. Within a week, the village empties. The houses are locked. The school thins. The elderly settle back into their quiet routines. The fields await a monsoon that may or may not produce enough to justify staying through the next season.

This annual rhythm — departure, absence, return, celebration, departure — has become the fundamental temporal structure of village life in migration-heavy areas. The calendar is not organized around the agricultural cycle, as it would be in a farming community that still farms. It is organized around the migration cycle: when the sardars come, when the trains depart, when the kilns release their workers, when the festival draws people home. The village’s clock is set not by the monsoon but by the labor market eight hundred kilometers away.

The Global Pattern

Western Odisha’s empty village is not unique. The pattern repeats wherever an economy exports its people because it cannot employ them.

In Mexico’s southern and western states — Oaxaca, Guerrero, Michoacan — villages emptied as working-age men migrated to the United States through the bracero programs of the mid-twentieth century and the unauthorized crossings that followed. The consequences were identical: aging populations, children raised by grandparents, women farming alone, villages sustained by remittances from Texas and California and Illinois. Remesas transformed the physical appearance of villages — new houses, paved roads, churches refurbished — while the human infrastructure of community life deteriorated. Mexico’s National Population Council has documented villages in Oaxaca where 60% of the population is over sixty, a demographic structure sustained entirely by money sent from across the border.

In southern Italy’s Mezzogiorno, the pattern played out over a century. Southern Italians migrated to the industrial north — Turin, Milan, Genoa — and to the Americas, leaving behind an agricultural economy that could not compete with the wages of factory work. The Italian government’s response — the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno development fund, operational from 1950 to 1992 — poured investment into the south without reversing the migration dynamic, because the fundamental gap between what the south’s economy offered and what the north’s economy paid remained. Today, southern Italy’s demographic decline is among Europe’s most severe, with birth rates below replacement, out-migration continuing, and villages literally depopulating.

In China, the hukou system — which ties social benefits to a person’s registered place of residence rather than where they actually live — created a migrant underclass of hundreds of millions of rural workers who moved to coastal factories while their children and parents remained in inland villages. The “left-behind children” of China’s rural interior number an estimated 61 million. The social consequences — depression among left-behind elderly, educational deficits among left-behind children, family dissolution — mirror those observed in western Odisha with almost eerie precision.

In India, the pattern repeats across the northern and eastern states. Bihar sends workers to Punjab’s fields and Delhi’s construction sites. Jharkhand sends laborers to brick kilns and mines. Uttar Pradesh’s migration is so massive that the state is simultaneously one of India’s most populous and one of its most labor-depleted in rural areas.

What distinguishes Odisha’s version from these parallels is not the pattern but the specific features that intensify it. The dadan system adds a layer of debt bondage that Mexico’s bracero workers and China’s migrant factory workers do not typically face. The KBK region’s baseline poverty — 47 to 59% multidimensional poverty in the worst districts, three to four times the national average — means the starting position is lower. And the state’s failure to industrialize means there is no proximate alternative. Bihar’s workers can at least migrate to nearby Jharkhand or within-state industrial towns. Western Odisha’s workers must travel 800 to 1,500 kilometers because there is nothing closer that pays.

This combination — debt bondage at the point of departure, extreme poverty as the baseline, and no regional industrial alternative — makes the empty village of western Odisha not a version of the global pattern but an intensified case of it. The structural logic is the same. The lived reality is harsher.

The Development Paradox

Here is the problem stated as simply as possible: you cannot develop a place whose working-age population is not there.

Every development intervention — infrastructure investment, skill training, industrial policy, agricultural modernization, healthcare improvement — requires a population to serve, to employ, to train, and to participate. When the population that would benefit from a new irrigation canal is working in an Andhra Pradesh brick kiln, the canal serves the elderly and the children who remain. When the skill development center opens in Balangir but the young people who would attend it have already left for Surat, the center operates below capacity. When the MGNREGA scheme offers 300 days of work per household but the household’s working members are earning three to four times the MGNREGA wage in another state, the scheme does not compete.

The chicken-and-egg problem is real and not easily resolved. People leave because there are no opportunities. Opportunities do not emerge because people have left. A new factory in Balangir needs workers — but the workers are in Surat, earning wages that the Balangir factory, in its early stages, may not be able to match. An irrigation project in Nuapada would transform agriculture — but the farmers who would benefit have already adjusted their livelihood strategy around seasonal migration, and the institutional capacity to implement the project (the engineers, the contractors, the supervisors) is itself depleted by migration.

Consider the Odisha TEX 2025 initiative: 33 memoranda of understanding worth Rs 7,808 crore, projecting 53,300 direct jobs, with worker subsidies of Rs 6,000 to Rs 7,000 per month. The initiative directly targets the Ganjam-Surat corridor’s labor pool, offering textile work within Odisha. But the gap between an MOU and a functioning factory, between a projected job and an actual paycheck, is where decades of Odisha’s development story has collapsed. FDI in Odisha for 2024-25: Rs 67,000 crore announced versus Rs 39 crore actual. POSCO’s $12 billion steel plant, announced in 2005, never materialized. ArcelorMittal’s commitment evaporated. The state has mastered the announcement. It has not mastered the ecosystem that turns announcements into operating businesses.

The MGNREGA expansion — extended to 300 days per year in 30 migration-prone blocks, benefiting 5.57 lakh families — is the most direct government attempt to make staying economically viable. But the arithmetic does not favor it. MGNREGA pays Rs 237 per day, supplemented by a state top-up of Rs 115, bringing the effective rate to Rs 352 per day. A Surat powerloom worker earns Rs 20,000 to Rs 25,000 per month — roughly Rs 770 to Rs 960 per day. The MGNREGA wage is less than half. Even at 300 days per year, a MGNREGA household earns roughly Rs 1,05,600 annually. A Surat migrant household, with its dramatically higher wage rate, earns Rs 2,40,000 to Rs 3,00,000.

The wage gap is not the only factor. The powerloom worker in Surat has a community, a routine, a mess hall, a social network. The MGNREGA worker in Balangir has rain-dependent agriculture, a 3% irrigation rate, and a village where half the population has already left. The pull of the destination is not just economic. It is social. It is habitual. It is the inertia of an established life in a place that, for all its miseries, at least pays.

The Distress Migration Task Force constituted by the Majhi government in October 2024 — led by Deputy Chief Minister K.V. Singh Deo, with members including the Chief Secretary and Development Commissioner — represents the latest attempt to address the problem at a structural level. Awareness campaigns in 30 migration-prone blocks, destination-state visits for rehabilitation planning, skill development linkages. NewsClick described the task force as “a gold filling to hide decay” — a cosmetic intervention masking deep structural failure. That may be uncharitable. But the history of similar interventions in Odisha and in other migration-source regions is not encouraging. The Orissa Dadan Labour Act was passed in 1975 — the first state-level law in India specifically addressing migrant labor exploitation. Fifty years later, the dadan system is larger than ever and the act is universally described as a dead letter.

The structural requirements for reversing the migration dynamic are known and can be listed briefly. Irrigation that enables multi-crop agriculture. Local industry that pays wages competitive with destination-state wages. Financial inclusion that replaces the sardar’s advance with formal credit. Healthcare and education quality sufficient to make staying desirable beyond economic necessity. Skills training aligned with regional employment opportunities. Interstate coordination that provides portable benefits and voting rights for migrants who continue to migrate.

Each of these is achievable individually. Several have been attempted. None has been implemented at the scale required to alter the calculus that drives a family in Sargul village to lock their house in November and board a train.

The Permanent Condition

The deepest question about the empty village is whether it is a transitional state or a permanent one.

The optimistic reading is transitional. Migration is a response to poverty. As Odisha’s economy grows — and it is growing, at 7.9% real GSDP growth in 2025-26, above the national average — the conditions that drive migration will ameliorate. The state’s per capita income is rising (Rs 1,86,761 in 2025-26, up 9.2%, outpacing national growth of 6.9%). Female labor force participation is increasing (48.7% in 2024, up from 37.6% in 2022). The textile MoUs, the skill development programs, the MGNREGA expansion, the Bhubaneswar IT ecosystem — these are early indicators of an economy that is, slowly, building the capacity to retain its population. Give it time. The empty village is a phase.

The pessimistic reading — and the evidence, I think, tilts toward it, though I state this at perhaps 60% confidence and could be wrong — is that the empty village is becoming a permanent feature of western Odisha’s landscape.

Here is why. The children being raised in those villages — by grandparents, with intermittent schooling, with the daily observable lesson that economic survival requires leaving — are being socialized into migration. They are not being prepared for a local economy that does not exist. They are being prepared to follow the path their parents took. The secondary school dropout rate of 27.3% is not just a loss of human capital in the abstract. It is the closing of doors that might have led to something other than the brick kiln or the powerloom. The child who drops out at fourteen will not attend the skill development center when it opens. He will accept the sardar’s advance the way his father did.

The village itself, as an economic and social unit, is degrading. Each year of depopulation makes recovery harder. The network effects that sustain a village economy — the critical mass of transactions, the institutional density, the social infrastructure — erode incrementally. A village that has been partially empty for ten years does not simply refill when economic conditions improve. Its institutions have atrophied. Its social bonds have weakened. Its young people have never known it as a fully functioning community. The physical village remains. The social village — the dense web of relationships, obligations, and mutual dependence that makes a geographical location a community — may not.

The comparison with southern Italy is instructive. The Cassa per il Mezzogiorno pumped investment into the Italian south for forty-two years. The south developed, in aggregate economic terms. Per capita income rose. Infrastructure improved. But the demographic hollowing continued. Young people left for the north. Birth rates collapsed. Today, villages in Calabria and Basilicata are literally selling houses for one euro to attract settlers, because the indigenous population has gone.

Odisha is not Italy. The demographic and economic contexts differ enormously. But the structural dynamic — the self-reinforcing loop in which departure causes further departure, in which the village’s decline makes the village less worth staying in, in which each generation inherits the expectation of leaving — is recognizable. The empty village is not waiting for a policy intervention that will refill it. It is moving toward a stable state in which emptiness is the norm.

The children of Sargul village are being raised with the expectation that they, too, will leave. Their grandparents know it. Their mothers, farming alone, know it. The sardars who will come to recruit them in ten or fifteen years know it. The only question is whether the destination will still be a brick kiln or whether the economy will have shifted enough to offer them something marginally better — a powerloom in Surat, a construction site in Hyderabad, a factory floor in an industrial corridor that Odisha’s government announced but may or may not have built.

That is the cost of the empty village. Not just the present absence, but the future it is producing. A village that exports its children is a village that has decided, collectively and without anyone consciously making the decision, that its own future will happen somewhere else.

Sources

Migration Scale and Tracking:

Women and Agriculture:

Children and Education:

Fallow Land and Agriculture:

Marriage Distortions:

Elderly:

Mental Health and Migrant Deaths:

Government Response:

Comparative:

Source Research

The raw research that informs this series.