Why Odisha's people build everywhere but home
46 million people. Each dot here is a lakh — 100,000 Odias.
Somewhere between 20 and 50 lakh of them live and work outside the state. How many exactly? Nobody knows. Kerala has been counting its migrants since 1998. Odisha got around to its first survey in 2023.
Not one leaving. Three. Each starts from a different place, ends in a different place, and means something different for the people who go.
A family takes an advance. Thirty-five to sixty thousand rupees. For six months, they go to brick kilns in Andhra — making six lakh bricks. Fifteen hours a day, every single day. Most of them are between 16 and 29. By 30, their bodies give out.
The government tracked about 94,000 dadan workers in 2025. A third more than the year before. The real number? Much higher. Nobody keeps count.
Seven to eight lakh Odias in Surat. If you put them together, they would make a city bigger than Sambalpur.
Twelve-hour shifts. Every day of the week. Twenty to twenty-five thousand a month — three to four times what MGNREGA would pay. One loom master counted 27 funerals in a single year.
This is a room in Surat. 500 to 800 square feet. Sixty people sleep here. Two shifts share the same floor space. Six feet by three — that is what each person gets.
Why do they go? It is not desperation. It is math.
MGNREGA promises 100 days of work a year. Delivers 53. That is twelve and a half thousand rupees. Surat gives you work every single day. Three lakh a year. Twenty-four times more.
Every month, 120 crore rupees flows back to Ganjam. That is 1,440 crore a year — from one district.
The money builds houses nobody lives in. Repays debts. Puts children through school — children who will also leave. Almost none of it gets invested locally.
Nine lakh hectares of farmland sit empty. The national cropping intensity is 156%. Odisha is at 117%. The land is waiting for hands that are in Surat.
Behind every person who left, someone stayed. Women do 75% of the farming and 95% of the animal care — by themselves. More than 83% of them do not have enough food.
Odisha spends 25 to 40 lakh to raise and educate one graduate. That graduate earns 8 to 15 crore over a lifetime — in Bangalore, Hyderabad, or the US. The destination captures all the value.
Same thing we do with iron ore. Sell it at 5,000 a tonne. Someone else makes steel at 90,000. We export the raw material — people or minerals — and let someone else add the value.
When COVID hit, ten lakh Odias tried to come home. Shramik trains carried 3,58,000. Almost everyone said they did not want to go back.
Within five months, they were going back. Nothing had changed at home. By October, the dadan sardars were already recruiting for the next season.
The leaving is not the problem. It is the symptom. The problem is an economy that sends out its raw material — people and ore — and waits for someone else to make something of it.