Geography of Orissa

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Orissa, with its vast natural and human resources, is a land of immense potential. Yet it has remained a poor state with one of the lowest per capita income in the country. Orissa also has a good number of people living below the poverty line. Presenting a holistic approach of the land and people of the state, the book discusses all its geo-economic aspects including eco-degradation. It will serve as an excellent reference/textbook on Orissa.

B.N. Sinha, retired as the Professor and Head of Post- graduate Department of Geography, Utkal University, Bhubaneswar. He was also a visiting professor, Department of Earth Sciences, Manipur University, Imphal. Author of 17 books and more than 88 research papers, he served as the Honorary Editor of the Indian Council of Geographers, President of the Eastern Geographical Society, Bhubaneswar and President of National Council of Theoretical and Applied Research. He also served as President of the Deccan Geographical Society, Osmania University, Hyderabad, and the Indian Council of Geographers. As a visiting professor under the Senior Fulbright Heys Exchange Programme to the USA during 1973-74, he lectured at many American and Canadian universities and guided several research scholars at Karnataka and Utkal universities.

Several years of research have gone into the writing of this book for which I have drawn liberally on my theses submitted to the University of Calcutta for my MA and PhD degrees in late fifties. This is more so in the case of my PhD thesis on 'Geo-economic Planning of Orissa'. In addition, materials gathered from field studies during the past four-and-a-half decades have been utilized. The first edition appeared in September 1971 and the second revised and enlarged edition in 1981. Since this is the only authentic source book on Orissa, it went out of print within a few years of its publication and the NBT pressed me very hard to revise it for a third edition. The work for this edition started in mid-1991, exactly after a decade of the publication of the second edition.

This edition incorporates a lot of new information because during the past decades Orissa has changed a lot. There has been a lot of degradation of the physical environment for which it became necessary to add a new chapter on 'Environmental Degradation' since Orissa has suffered a lot compared to other States. In the other chapters, the latest data has been incorporated with projections for AD 2001.

My analysis of developmental activities in Orissa has led me to conclude that although the State is endowed with vast natural resources it has remained the second most poor State in the country, next only to Bihar. Due to the recent discovery of vast mineral resources, it is like a 'Sleeping lion' which must be awakened. My analysis has also revealed that Orissa has not been given its due share by the Union Government for its planning during the past four decades and this is the reason for its present backwardness.