Dr. Padmalochan Dash
Odisha carries its history in layers. The state that buried its dead after the Super Cyclone of 1999 is not the state that stands today at the edge of becoming India's gateway to the eastern economic corridor. Two plus years into the double-engine government, with the Hon'ble Chief Minister's ten-point directive already reshaping the daily grammar of policing, it is worth asking a harder question than whether law and order has improved. The question is whether Odisha's security architecture has kept pace with what the state is now attempting to become. The answer, examined honestly, is that it has not, and that gap is where the real work of the next decade must be done.
THE UNFINISHED LEDGER OF 1999
Begin with the hardest issue first, because it is also the most neglected. The 1999 cyclone did not only destroy infrastructure. It created, in its aftermath, precisely the conditions in which organised crime incubates: a governance vacuum, a wave of displaced and desperate people, weakened institutional oversight, and reconstruction money moving through systems that were never designed to absorb it at that scale. Twenty-seven years is long enough for whatever criminal ecosystems formed in that vacuum to have matured, diversified, and in some cases legitimised themselves within the state's commercial life. Land grabbing along the coast, diversion of relief and reconstruction funds, illegal resource extraction in the mineral belt, and coastal smuggling routes that predate the cyclone but expanded after it, these are not settled matters. Many remain unresolved or only partially investigated, and the institutional memory of who benefited and how has faded with each change of government.
This is not a call for nostalgia or for reopening old wounds for their own sake. It is a strategic argument. Criminal networks that have had twenty-seven years to embed themselves in logistics, finance, and local politics do not remain static. They professionalise. Odisha's Crime Branch and financial intelligence apparatus, working in that, should treat this legacy re-examination as a standing mandate rather than a historical footnote, using the forensic and data-analytic tools that did not exist in 1999 but exist now. A state that wants to be trusted with the scale of investment the corridor ambition implies cannot afford unresolved criminal ledgers sitting quietly beneath its growth story.
There is also a generational dimension to this that policymakers tend to overlook. The officials who administered the 1999 reconstruction, and who would carry the institutional memory of where the gaps were, have largely retired or moved on. Every year of delay in reopening these files is a year in which that memory erodes further and the paper trail thins. A dedicated legacy-crime cell, staffed jointly by the Crime Branch, the state's financial intelligence functions, and archival researchers with access to reconstruction-era records, would be a modest investment against what is otherwise a permanently closing window.
HARD SECURITY BEFORE SOFT NARRATIVE
The Chief Minister's ten-point directive is a credible operational start, and it deserves the credit due to any government that chooses to name law and order as a first-year priority rather than a talking point deferred to the second or third year. But a ten-point operational directive is not the same instrument as a strategic security architecture, and Odisha now needs both.
Start with critical infrastructure. The state's railways, ports, power grid, mining operations, petroleum facilities, and telecommunications backbone have historically been protected as individual assets rather than as an interdependent system. That approach is no longer adequate wherein a single well-placed disruption, physical or cyber, can cascade across sectors that were assumed to be unconnected. Every district hosting strategic assets needs a Critical Infrastructure Protection Plan, refreshed through regular vulnerability assessment rather than produced once and filed away.
Supply chain security deserves equal standing as a policing function, not a customs afterthought. Mineral smuggling, fuel diversion, cargo theft, and fertilizer diversion are not petty offences in a state whose economic identity rests on mining, ports, and industrial logistics. Each rupee diverted through these channels is a rupee that should have reached the formal economy that the corridor strategy is trying to build.
Cyber security and the protection of digital public infrastructure belong in the same conversation, not a separate one. As Odisha's governance, banking, healthcare, and municipal systems digitise, the state's data centres and citizen databases become as strategic as its ports. Deepfakes, ransomware, and AI-enabled fraud are no longer speculative threats for a state government to plan around; they are active operational risks, and the readiness gap between announcement and capability remains wide.
WHAT THE DIRECTIVE HAS NOT YET NAMED
Any honest audit must also name what remains outside the current conversation. Odisha's four hundred and eighty kilometre coastline is patrolled unevenly, and coastal security coordination between the Marine Police, the Coast Guard, and the Forest Department on matters of smuggling, illegal fishing, and infiltration risk needs a formal fusion mechanism, not periodic joint exercises. The southern and western districts, Malkangiri, Koraput, Kalahandi, and parts of Kandhamal, carry a residual Left Wing Extremism footprint that has receded in visibility but not necessarily in underlying grievance; development without a parallel security and trust-building strategy in these districts risks a recurrence rather than a resolution.
Human trafficking, particularly the movement of minors and women into bonded and forced labour outside the state, is a chronic issue that rarely receives the sustained institutional attention given to more visible crimes. Odisha remains, by most independent assessments, among the states of origin for a significant share of India's trafficking cases, and this deserves a dedicated inter-state task force rather than case-by-case rescue operations. Forensic infrastructure is another quiet gap; conviction rates in serious crime remain constrained less by investigation than by the state's forensic laboratory capacity and the pace of trial disposal, and no security architecture built only around prevention and detection will hold if prosecution remains the weak link.
Prison and correctional reform, industrial and construction site safety enforcement, and the security of migrant labour populations moving into Odisha's new industrial zones also deserve mention. A corridor economy pulls in workers from across eastern India, and their vulnerability to exploitation, wage fraud, and unsafe conditions is itself a security and governance concern, not merely a labour matter.
Two further gaps deserve naming precisely because they sit at the intersection of hard security and economic ambition. First, the judicial and prosecutorial pipeline. Odisha's fast-track and special courts for economic offences, cybercrime, and organised crime remain thin relative to caseload, and an investigation-heavy strategy without a matching prosecution capacity produces headlines but not deterrence. A state serious about its security architecture must budget for judicial infrastructure with the same seriousness it budgets for surveillance technology, wherein the two are, in practice, a single pipeline rather than separate departments. Second, narcotics and coastal drug trafficking along the Bay of Bengal routes have grown in scale across the eastern seaboard over the past decade, and Odisha's port towns and river mouths are not insulated from this trend merely because the larger seizures have historically been reported further south. A dedicated coastal narcotics task force, working with the Narcotics Control Bureau and the Coast Guard rather than around them, would close a gap that current reporting still treats as episodic rather than structural.
INTELLIGENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE PREDICTIVE TURN
Odisha's move toward AI-enabled and predictive policing, hotspot mapping, patrol optimisation, and integrated surveillance, is the correct direction, provided it is built with appropriate legal safeguards around facial recognition and data use, so that the state does not trade one form of vulnerability for another. A permanent State Intelligence Fusion Centre integrating Police, Special Branch, Cyber Crime, Coastal Security, Forest, Excise, Narcotics, and Financial Intelligence functions would do more for early warning than any number of standalone technology pilots. Financial forensics, cryptocurrency tracking, and asset confiscation capability matter here as much as they do in the legacy crime context, because dismantling a criminal network's finances degrades it far more permanently than arresting its operatives. A State Police Innovation Centre, working with universities and industry on indigenous policing technology, would give this predictive turn institutional permanence rather than leaving it dependent on individual officers or one-time procurement cycles.
WOMEN'S SAFETY AND COMMUNITY TRUST AS SECURITY INFRASTRUCTURE
Women's safety deserves treatment as public safety infrastructure, not as a standalone welfare scheme. Safe City surveillance, secure public transport, safety audits of institutions and workplaces, and integrated victim support services build the kind of everyday trust that no ten-point directive can manufacture through enforcement alone. Community intelligence networks, built with village committees, fishermen's associations, transport operators, and resident welfare bodies, remain among the most underused early warning systems available to any state government, precisely because they cost little and require sustained relationship-building rather than a single budget line.
Disaster preparedness and internal security must also be planned together rather than in parallel silos, given that Odisha's own history shows how cyclones, floods, and industrial accidents can create the exact governance gaps that organised crime exploits. Continuity of government operations, evacuation security, and post-disaster anti-trafficking and anti-looting protocols should be written into the same planning documents as the state's cyclone response manuals, not treated as an afterthought once relief operations conclude.
THE CORRIDOR AMBITION AND WHY SECURITY IS ITS PRECONDITION
This is the argument that ties the entire discussion together, and it is the one most likely to be missed in conventional law-and-order commentary. Odisha has set itself an ambitious economic horizon: to position itself as the middle anchor of the eastern India economic corridor, to become a developed state by 2037, and to contribute meaningfully to India's Viksit Bharat goal of 2047. Ports at Paradip, Dhamra, and Gopalpur, industrial corridors built around steel, aluminium, and petrochemicals, and a mineral base that remains strategically significant for the entire country, all of this positions Odisha as a genuine node in India's national economic architecture rather than a peripheral state waiting for attention.
But no investor, domestic or foreign, places long-term capital into a corridor whose critical infrastructure, supply chains, and industrial assets carry unresolved security risk. Security is, in that, not a constraint on the corridor ambition; it is a precondition for it. A single major disruption to a port, a power transmission corridor, or a mining logistics chain does not merely cost Odisha a quarter's growth figures; it signals to every future investor that the state's risk profile is higher than its growth pitch suggests. By keeping this at centrality, the double-engine government's economic strategy and its security strategy should be understood as one document, not two.
There is a further consideration that Odisha's planners would do well to internalise early. As the eastern corridor takes shape, Odisha will increasingly compete for the same capital, the same shipping lines, and the same industrial anchors that West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, and, further afield, Bangladesh and Vietnam are also courting. In that competition, a demonstrable security and resilience premium, the confidence that an investment placed in Odisha will not be disrupted by an unaddressed criminal ecosystem, an unprotected supply chain, or an unmanaged cyber vulnerability, becomes as much a competitive asset as the state's mineral reserves or its port depth. Security policy, viewed this way, is not a defensive expenditure. It is an instrument of economic diplomacy, and the states that understand this first will draw capital away from those that treat security purely as a domestic law-and-order matter.
The 2037 developed-state target and the 2047 national goal both assume a degree of institutional confidence that only a mature security architecture can provide. Odisha's contribution to Viksit Bharat cannot be measured only in GSDP growth or in the tonnage moving through its ports. It must also be measured in whether the state has built the kind of internal resilience, financial transparency, and criminal-justice capacity that allow rapid economic growth to translate into durable prosperity rather than a widening gap that organised crime and informal governance quietly fill.
TOWARD A STATE SECURITY AND RESILIENCE STRATEGY
The cumulative case here points toward a single institutional conclusion. Odisha needs a formally articulated State Security and Resilience Strategy that brings internal security, cyber security, coastal security, critical infrastructure protection, supply chain resilience, industrial security, disaster and climate resilience, and economic security under one strategic document, reviewed and updated on a fixed cycle rather than produced once for a press release. Performance measurement across this architecture should also be modernised, moving beyond raw crime statistics to citizen satisfaction, conviction quality, cybercrime recovery rates, and institutional integrity, so that success is measured by outcomes that actually matter to citizens and investors alike.
None of this diminishes the credit due to the current government's ten-point directive, which correctly named law and order as a governance priority rather than an afterthought. A strategy document alone changes nothing without an accountability mechanism attached to it, and Odisha would do well to place this strategy under a standing legislative or cabinet-level review rather than leaving it as an executive circular that can be quietly deprioritised by the next administrative reshuffle. But twenty-seven years after the cyclone and two years into this government's term, the honest reading is that Odisha has addressed the visible, urgent layer of security while leaving the deeper, structural layer, legacy organised crime, critical infrastructure interdependence, supply chain vulnerability, coastal and border coordination, and the financial architecture of organised crime, largely untouched. Closing that gap is not optional if Odisha is serious about the corridor it wants to become. It is, in fact, the single most consequential governance decision available to the state in this decade, and one on which every other ambition, economic, developmental, and national, ultimately depends.
The questions that remain are not rhetorical. They are the checklist against which Odisha's next decade of governance should be measured, and they deserve an answer sooner rather than later.
(The content of this article reflects the views of writer and contributor, not necessarily those of the publisher and editor. All disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of competent courts and forums in Delhi/New Delhi only)
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