Odisha Moved 9,83,642 People Out of Cyclone Phailin's Path in 2013, Produces More Than Half of India's Iron Ore and Became a Province on 1 April 1936

The Odisha State Disaster Management Authority was registered on 29 December 1999, two months after a super cyclone crossed the coast near Paradip and killed nearly 10,000 people, according to the India Meteorological Department’s journal Mausam. When Cyclone Phailin made landfall near Gopalpur on 12 October 2013, the state moved 9,83,642 people out of its path, and the department’s report records 21 deaths from the cyclone itself. Odisha also mined 149 million of the 277.3 million tonnes of iron ore India produced in 2023-24, the Indian Bureau of Mines reports. The 2011 Census counted 4,19,74,218 people, and the census figures below come from that count because the next one is under way.

How a six-district province became a state

Orissa became a separate province on 1 April 1936. The state government’s own reference annual says it was separated from Bengal, Madras and the Central Provinces, and that the movement was led during the First World War by Pandit Gopabandhu Das. A government magazine, the Odisha Review, describes the Utkal Sammilani, an organisation of Odia speakers whose first session met at Cuttack on 30 December 1903, as the vehicle for the demand to unite Odia-speaking areas. It lists the new province’s six districts as Cuttack, Puri, Balasore, Sambalpur, Koraput and Ganjam, with Cuttack as capital and Sir John Hubback as the first Governor. The same article records Telugu-speaking opposition in parts of Ganjam to joining the new province.

The first Assembly was constituted on 3 February 1937. By 1948, the reference annual says, the princely states (small kingdoms ruled by their own princes under British overlordship) had merged with the province, and thirteen districts were formed. Saraikela and Kharsawan went to Bihar after the States Reorganisation Commission. The Constitution’s First Schedule defines Odisha as the territory that was part of the Province of Orissa, or administered as if it were, when the Constitution began on 26 January 1950.

The state’s chronology says the foundation stone of a new capital was laid at Bhubaneswar in 1948 and the capital moved there from Cuttack in 1949. The Orissa (Alteration of Name) Act, 2011 changed the name to Odisha from 1 November 2011, and the Ninety-sixth Amendment changed the language’s name from Oriya to Odia from 23 September 2011.

How the state is governed

Article 168 lists the states with two Houses of the legislature, and Odisha is not among them, so the Legislative Assembly is the whole legislature. It has 147 seats. Counting the MLAs listed in the 2014 reference annual, 24 seats are reserved for Scheduled Castes and 33 for Scheduled Tribes, the groups the Constitution lists for special protection. Under Article 172 an Assembly runs five years from its first meeting. The reference annual lists the first Assembly after Independence as sitting from 20 February 1952.

Article 164(1A) caps the Council of Ministers at 15 per cent of the Assembly, which comes to 22 here by tuput’s arithmetic, with a floor of twelve. A proviso to Article 164 names Odisha, with Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh, as a state that must have a minister in charge of tribal welfare.

Odisha sends 21 members to the Lok Sabha, 3 of the seats reserved for Scheduled Castes and 5 for Scheduled Tribes in the 2014 listing, and 10 to the Rajya Sabha under the Fourth Schedule. The reference annual counts 30 districts, 58 sub-divisions, 317 tehsils, 314 blocks and 6,227 gram panchayats. The reference annual places the Orissa High Court at Cuttack and dates its founding there to 1948. An Official Language Act of 1954 brought Odia into official work, and the Culture Ministry says Odia was accorded classical language status on 1 March 2014, the sixth language to receive it.

The Constitution’s footnote to the Fifth Schedule lists the Scheduled Areas (States of Bihar, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa) Order, 1977 among the orders that fix those areas, which are tribal regions under special rules. Our explainer on the Fifth and Sixth Schedules covers how those rules work, including the Supreme Court’s order of 18 April 2013 sending a bauxite mining question in Kalahandi and Rayagada to village councils.

What the economy earns

PRS Legislative Research estimates Odisha’s real GSDP growth in 2025-26 at 7.9 per cent against 7.4 per cent for India. It puts agriculture, manufacturing and services at 29, 32 and 39 per cent of the economy. Per capita GSDP is estimated at Rs 2,10,186 against Rs 2,51,394 for India, about 16 per cent lower by tuput’s arithmetic.

The budget presented on 20 February 2026 projects GSDP at Rs 11.07 lakh crore for 2026-27, up 12 per cent on the revised figure for 2025-26. It sets net spending at Rs 2,88,000 crore, a revenue surplus of 3 per cent of GSDP (Rs 33,000 crore) and a fiscal deficit target of 3.5 per cent. Capital outlay, spending on building assets, is Rs 72,100 crore. PRS adds that the state underspent its capital budget by 17 per cent on average between 2021-22 and 2024-25.

Revenue receipts are put at Rs 2,48,500 crore. Of that, 57 per cent is the state’s own and 43 per cent comes from the Centre, as its share of central taxes and as grants. Own non-tax revenue is estimated at Rs 71,000 crore, and 75 per cent of it, Rs 53,000 crore, is mining. Our explainer on state finances puts that against other states.

What the ground holds

The Indian Bureau of Mines’s yearbook says Odisha is the leading producer of chromite, bauxite, manganese ore and iron ore, and holds 96 per cent of the country’s chromite resources, 51 per cent of its bauxite and 34 per cent of its haematite iron ore as of 1 April 2020. Its December 2024 summary lists Odisha as the only chromite-producing state, at 3.15 million tonnes in 2023-24. For bauxite it shows 17.6 of India’s 23.9 million tonnes, and for iron ore 149.0 of 277.3 million tonnes.

The state’s mining corporation also pays for hockey. Odisha Mining Corporation has sponsored the senior and junior men’s and women’s Indian teams since 2018, and the Odisha Cabinet extended the deal for ten years to 31 January 2033, with Rs 434.12 crore to go to Hockey India, The Bridge reported on 24 April 2023. The 2023 men’s World Cup was played at Bhubaneswar and Rourkela, and Germany beat Belgium in the final at the Kalinga Stadium on 29 January 2023, winning the shoot-out 5-4 after a 3-3 draw. Guinness World Records verified the 20,011 permanent seats of Rourkela’s Birsa Munda Hockey Stadium, built for that tournament, as the largest fully seated hockey stadium on the same date. Our piece on the 2024 Paris bronze covers the team’s results since.

The cyclone record

The 1999 storm crossed near Paradip on 29 October, with core winds estimated at 260 to 270 kilometres an hour and a surge of more than 20 feet, the Mausam synopsis says. OSDMA says the state set it up as an autonomous body by a Finance Department resolution of 28 December 1999, originally as the Orissa State Disaster Mitigation Authority, and renamed it in 2008.

Phailin crossed the coast around 1700 UTC on 12 October 2013 with sustained winds of 215 kilometres an hour, the most intense landfall since 1999, the weather department says. Its Odisha table lists 9,83,642 people evacuated because of the cyclone, 21 deaths from it and 17 more from the floods that followed. Our report on cyclone warnings compares forecasts and shelters across later storms.

A lagoon and a chariot

The Chilika Development Authority describes Chilika as Asia’s largest brackish water lagoon, spreading about 1,165 square kilometres in the rainy season and 906 in the dry season, and calls it a habitat of endangered Irrawaddy dolphins. The Environment Ministry’s backgrounder says Chilika and Keoladeo National Park in Rajasthan were the first two sites placed on India’s Ramsar list of wetlands of international importance.

UNESCO inscribed the Sun Temple at Konark in 1984. It describes a chariot of the sun god with twelve pairs of wheels drawn by seven horses, built under Narasimha Deva I (AD 1238 to 1264). Our article on Konark covers the temple’s construction and what survives. The reference annual counts 62 tribal and 13 primitive tribal communities, the term it uses, and puts Scheduled Tribes at 22.08 per cent of the 2011 population and Scheduled Castes at 17.1 per cent.

What comes next

The census now under way will replace the 2011 count of 4,19,74,218, which found 70,03,656 people in towns, about 17 per cent by tuput’s arithmetic, and a sex ratio of 979 women per 1,000 men. The current Assembly’s five-year term runs into 2029. The hockey sponsorship runs to 31 January 2033. The 2026-27 budget expects Rs 53,000 crore from mining within revenue receipts of Rs 2,48,500 crore.