Chapter 2 — Lesson 1 ସମ୍ବଳ ଓ ତାହାର ବିକାଶ

In the previous unit we saw that a resource is created when nature, technology and institutions come together. Resource development is the name of that process. It is the set of activities by which a material or a feature of the environment that has been lying unused, a potential resource, is surveyed, evaluated, made accessible and put to productive use for the benefit of society.

Development of a resource normally runs through a few recognisable steps. First comes discovery: people must know that the resource exists. Coal was known in Talcher for a long time before anyone thought of mining it. Second comes evaluation: the quantity and quality must be measured to know whether use is worthwhile. Geologists drill boreholes to estimate the tonnage of ore; hydrologists measure the flow of a river through the year. Third comes access: roads, railways, power lines and water supply must reach the site. Many potential resources in the hills of Odisha stayed unused because there was no road. Fourth comes investment in the machinery, buildings and trained people needed for extraction or use. Fifth comes utilisation, when the resource actually starts to yield goods and income. Along the way, laws must be passed, rights settled, and institutions created to manage the resource.

Resource development is thus a human activity as much as a natural one. Two regions with the same natural endowment may be at very different levels of development because one has moved through these steps and the other has not. The coal of Talcher and the coal of parts of the north-east are geologically similar, but Talcher has railways, power stations and industries around it while much of the north-eastern coal remains potential.

Resource development also has a direction of growth. As technology improves, lower grades of ore become usable, deeper wells become possible, and materials that were once waste become resources. Fly ash from thermal power stations was once a nuisance; today it is a resource for cement and bricks. Iron ore fines that were dumped for decades are now made into pellets. The boundary between waste and resource keeps moving.

Finally, resource development has costs as well as benefits. A dam brings irrigation and power but submerges forests and villages; a mine brings employment and royalty but leaves pits and dust. The purpose of planning, which this lesson goes on to discuss, is to obtain the benefit while limiting the cost, and to make sure that the people who bear the cost also share the benefit. Development that ignores this is not development at all in the long run, because it destroys the base on which it rests.

The way people use resources has changed with each stage of human history, and each stage has added new resources to the list while changing the pressure on the environment.

In the hunting and gathering stage, which lasted for most of human existence, people used only what nature provided directly: wild fruits, roots, animals, fish, wood for fire, stone for tools. Their numbers were small and their tools simple, so the environment was hardly changed. Resources in this stage were almost entirely biotic and local.

The agricultural stage began about ten thousand years ago with the domestication of plants and animals. Land and soil became the chief resources, and water for irrigation followed. People cleared forests for fields, dug canals and built tanks, and settled in villages. In India the Indus valley and, later, the Gangetic plain and the eastern deltas developed rich agricultural civilisations. Odisha's coastal plain has been farmed for at least two and a half thousand years, and its old tanks and embankments date from this stage. Human impact on the environment now became visible, but it was slow and mostly reversible.

The industrial stage, which began in Britain in the eighteenth century and reached India in the nineteenth, changed everything. Coal, iron ore and later petroleum became the key resources; machines multiplied the amount of material that one worker could extract and transform; railways and steamships carried resources across continents. The scale of use rose enormously and so did the damage: forests were cut for railway sleepers, rivers were polluted, and colonial powers drained the resources of Asia and Africa for their own factories. Rourkela, Talcher and Sukinda belong to this stage in Odisha.

The modern or information stage, from the late twentieth century, has added knowledge itself as a resource, along with rare metals for electronics, and has made the whole earth one market. It has also made people aware, for the first time, that the environment is finite. This awareness produced the movement for conservation and sustainable development.

Two lessons follow. First, the list of resources is not fixed; every stage of technology creates new resources. Second, the pressure on the environment has grown with each stage, so that today the question is no longer whether people can use nature but whether they can stop themselves from using it up. The history of resource use is the reason why planning is now necessary.

Of all resources, human beings are the most important, because they alone create resources out of nature. A country's people, considered in terms of their number, skill, health, education and organisation, are called its human resources. The quality of human resources decides how well the other resources of a region are used.

The point is easily proved by comparison. Japan has almost no minerals or petroleum and only a small area of farmland, yet it is one of the richest and most industrialised nations, because its people are highly educated, skilled and organised. Switzerland has no coal, iron or oil, yet it is prosperous for the same reason. By contrast, several countries of Africa and parts of India possess enormous mineral wealth but remain poor because education, health and organisation have lagged. Natural resources are only potential wealth; human resources turn them into real wealth.

Human resources have two sides, quantity and quality. A large population is an asset if it is productive, and a burden if it is unemployed and unskilled. India's population is the largest in the world, which gives the country a huge labour force and market, but its value depends on literacy, technical training, health and the opportunity to work. The development of human resources, therefore, means investment in schools, colleges, technical institutes, hospitals and training, together with the creation of institutions that let people use their skills.

Human resources also include the intangible qualities of a society: its traditions of cooperation, its craftsmanship, its knowledge of local plants and soils, its willingness to save and invest. The tribal communities of Odisha carry a detailed knowledge of forest plants; the weavers of Sambalpur and Berhampur have skills built over centuries; the farmers of the delta know how to manage floods. These are resources as real as ore.

Odisha's human resources illustrate the argument of this lesson. The state has more than four crore people, a literacy rate of about 73 per cent by the 2011 Census, rising steadily, and a young population. Yet it has lagged in technical education and in health indicators, and many of its skilled workers migrate to other states. The mines and industries of the state have often been run with technology and management from outside, so that the state exported raw material and imported finished goods. Improving human resources through education, especially of girls and of the tribal population, through health care and through skill training is therefore the most important resource development that the state can undertake.

Human beings act on nature through two instruments, and both must be present for development to occur.

Technology is the knowledge of how to do things, together with the tools and machines that put that knowledge to work. Every step of resource development depends on it. Discovery needs surveying instruments and satellite imagery; evaluation needs drilling rigs and laboratories; access needs road-building and engineering; extraction needs excavators, pumps and furnaces; use needs factories and transport. Technology also decides what counts as a resource. Low-grade iron ore with less than 55 per cent iron was rejected for decades; beneficiation and pelletisation technology now make it usable, and the reserves of Odisha have grown without a single new discovery. On the other hand, technology used without care destroys resources: heavy machinery can flatten a forest, deep tube-wells can empty an aquifer, and trawlers can strip a fishing ground.

Institutions are the organised arrangements through which a society acts: laws, government departments, courts, companies, cooperatives, panchayats, markets, banks, and also customs and shared rules. Institutions decide who owns a resource, who may use it, at what price, and with what obligations. The Constitution places land, water and minor minerals under the states and major minerals and inter-state rivers under the Union; the Mines and Minerals Act regulates leases; the Forest Rights Act of 2006 recognises the claims of forest dwellers; panchayats manage village commons. Without such institutions, development becomes a scramble in which the strongest take everything and nobody looks after the future.

Technology and institutions must match. Advanced technology in the hands of weak institutions produces plunder: illegal mining in the Keonjhar-Sundargarh belt in the first decade of this century, when far more ore was dug than the leases allowed, is a case in point. Strong institutions with backward technology produce stagnation. The task of planning is to bring the two into balance.

India has built a large institutional structure for resource development: the Planning Commission and now the NITI Aayog for overall plans; the Geological Survey, the Forest Survey, the Central Water Commission and the Central Ground Water Board for inventory; public sector companies such as Coal India, the Steel Authority and Nalco for extraction and processing; and regulatory bodies for pollution control and environmental clearance. Odisha has the Odisha Mining Corporation, the Odisha Hydro Power Corporation, the Forest Department, the Water Resources Department and the District Mineral Foundations. Knowing the names is less important than understanding that each is an institution performing a step in resource development.

For most of the industrial age resources were developed without any plan beyond immediate profit. The results are now plain, and they must be understood before planning can make sense.

Depletion of resources. Indiscriminate use has exhausted many resources that once seemed limitless. Large parts of the world's forests have gone; many fish stocks have collapsed; petroleum and high-grade ores are running down; groundwater tables fall in every dry region. In India, the forest cover fell far below the one-third of the land that the national policy considers necessary, and only slow recovery has begun. Many plant and animal species have become extinct and many more are threatened.

Inequality. The accumulation of resources in a few hands has divided society into two segments, the haves and the have-nots, or the rich and the poor. Within nations a few families and companies control land, mines and industries; between nations a small number of developed countries consume most of the world's energy and materials. The regions that supply raw materials often gain least: mineral districts in Odisha and Jharkhand have poverty rates far above the national average, a pattern seen also in Africa and Latin America and called the resource curse.

Environmental crisis. The exploitation of resources has led to global ecological crises: global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels, the thinning of the ozone layer, environmental pollution of air, water and soil, and land degradation through erosion, salinity and desertification. These are no longer local problems. Carbon dioxide released in one country warms the whole planet; the rise in sea level threatens the coast of Odisha as much as the islands of the Pacific.

Social costs. Dams, mines and industries have displaced millions of people, a large share of them tribal, who lose not only land but a whole way of life. Hirakud displaced about 1.5 lakh people in the 1950s; the Rengali, Upper Indravati and Upper Kolab projects, the mines of Sundargarh and Keonjhar, and the industries of Kalinganagar and Jharsuguda added many more. Compensation was often poor and rehabilitation incomplete.

Taken together, these consequences show that resource development without planning defeats itself. It uses up the base, it concentrates the gain, it spreads the harm, and it breeds conflict. An equitable distribution of resources has therefore become essential for a sustained quality of life and for peace. That is the case for planning, and for the kind of development that is called sustainable.

The answer that the world has arrived at is sustainable development. The classic definition, given by the World Commission on Environment and Development in its 1987 report Our Common Future, is: development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. In simpler words, development should take place without damaging the environment, and development in the present should not compromise the needs of the future generations.

The idea rests on a few principles. Inter-generational equity: the resources of the earth are held in trust for those who come after us, so we must not exhaust them. Intra-generational equity: the benefits of development must be shared fairly among the people living now, between rich and poor and between regions. The carrying capacity of the environment: there is a limit to what nature can supply and absorb, and development must stay within it. Integration: economic, social and environmental goals must be planned together rather than one at the expense of the others. Precaution: where the damage from an activity may be serious and irreversible, the lack of full scientific certainty is no reason to go ahead. Participation: the people affected by a decision should have a voice in it.

Sustainable development is often shown as three overlapping circles, economy, society and environment, with true sustainability in the area where all three overlap. A steel plant that earns profit but poisons a river is in the economic circle alone. A protected forest from which local people are excluded and left hungry is in the environmental circle alone. A subsidy that feeds people today by mining the future is in the social circle alone. Only development that satisfies all three tests is sustainable.

For resources the principles translate into practical rules. Renewable resources should be used at or below their rate of regeneration. Non-renewable resources should be used efficiently, recycled, and replaced by renewable substitutes over time, and the income from them should be invested in lasting assets such as education and infrastructure rather than consumed. Pollution should be kept within the capacity of the environment to absorb it. The people who bear the costs of a project should share in its benefits.

Sustainable development does not mean no development. For a poor region it means development that lasts. Odisha, with abundant minerals that will one day be exhausted and forests and coasts that are easily damaged, has every reason to adopt it.

Sustainable development did not appear suddenly. It grew from a chain of thinkers, reports and conferences that a Class 10 student should be able to recall in order.

Mahatma Gandhi in the first half of the twentieth century warned that the earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need but not every man's greed. He blamed resource depletion on greedy and selfish individuals and on the exploitative nature of modern technology, opposed mass production and favoured production by the masses. His thinking placed the moral responsibility for conservation on each person and community.

The Club of Rome, a group of scientists, economists and industrialists formed in 1968, advocated resource conservation for the first time in a more systematic way. Its 1972 report Limits to Growth used computer models to show that unchecked growth in population and consumption would exhaust resources and collapse economies within a century. In the same year the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment met at Stockholm, and the United Nations Environment Programme was created.

In 1974 the economist E. F. Schumacher published Small is Beautiful, restating the Gandhian view for a Western audience: technology should be appropriate to human scale, and economics should treat nature as capital, not income.

The Brundtland Commission, formally the World Commission on Environment and Development chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway, published Our Common Future in 1987. This report gave the world the standard definition of sustainable development and linked poverty and environmental damage as two sides of one problem.

The Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 turned the idea into international commitments: the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Rio Declaration, the Forest Principles and Agenda 21, the global plan of action for sustainable development in the twenty-first century which asks every local government to prepare its own Local Agenda 21.

Later milestones built on Rio: the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 on greenhouse gases, the Johannesburg summit of 2002, the Rio+20 conference of 2012, the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015, and the Paris Agreement on climate change in the same year. India has been a party to all of these and has passed its own laws, from the Environment Protection Act of 1986 to the Biological Diversity Act of 2002, to give them effect.

The thread that runs through the whole chain is the same idea Gandhi expressed in one sentence: the earth is limited, greed is not, and a wise society must set the limit itself.

Resource planning is the widely accepted strategy for the judicious use of resources. It is a complex process, and in India it is understood to involve three stages, each with its own agencies and techniques.

Identification and inventory. The first task is to know what resources exist, where, in what quantity and of what quality. This involves surveying, mapping and the qualitative and quantitative estimation and measurement of resources. Topographical maps by the Survey of India, geological maps and mineral estimates by the Geological Survey of India and the Indian Bureau of Mines, biennial forest cover reports by the Forest Survey of India, soil maps by the National Bureau of Soil Survey and Land Use Planning, water data by the Central Water Commission and the Central Ground Water Board, population and workforce data by the Census, and satellite imagery from the National Remote Sensing Centre together form the national inventory. Odisha maintains state inventories through the Directorate of Geology, the Odisha Space Applications Centre and the forest and water departments.

Planning structure. The second stage is evolving a planning structure endowed with appropriate technology, skill and institutional set-up for implementing resource development plans. This means choosing technology suited to the resource and the region, training the people who will run it, and creating the organisations, public corporations, cooperatives, private firms, panchayat committees, with the laws under which they operate. A river basin plan needs hydrologists, dam engineers, an irrigation department and water user associations; a mineral belt needs geologists, mining engineers, a mining corporation and a pollution control board.

Matching with national plans. The third stage is matching the resource development plans with overall national development plans. Resource plans cannot stand alone; a mine needs a railway, a dam needs a market for its power, a plantation needs a paper mill. The plan for each resource must fit the plans for transport, energy, industry, agriculture and employment, and all of them must fit the goals of the nation, which today include the Sustainable Development Goals.

India has made concerted efforts at resource planning since the First Five Year Plan of 1951. The early plans emphasised big dams, steel plants and mines; the plans of the 1960s and 1970s emphasised agriculture; later plans added forestry, energy conservation and the environment; and since 2015 the NITI Aayog has replaced the Planning Commission with a more flexible, state-centred approach.

Planning has its limits. The mere availability of resources in the absence of corresponding changes in technology and institutions does not lead to development. Regions rich in resources have remained backward where these changes did not follow; regions poor in resources have prospered where they did. Planning must therefore address technology and institutions, not only the map of resources.

Because resources are unevenly distributed, planning must be regional. A plan that suits one region may be useless or harmful in another. This section shows why and how.

India offers every possible combination. Regions rich in one resource but poor in others: Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Madhya Pradesh have minerals and coal in abundance but lack irrigation, roads and industry. Regions rich in water but poor in infrastructure: Arunachal Pradesh and the other north-eastern states have enormous hydro-electric potential and forests but few roads and markets. Regions rich in energy but poor in water: Rajasthan has solar and wind energy in plenty but is short of water. Regions rich in scenery but poor in material resources: the cold desert of Ladakh has a rich cultural heritage and great tourist potential but lacks water, farmland and minerals. Regions self-sufficient in almost everything: the Punjab-Haryana plain has flat fertile land, canal and tube-well water, and infrastructure, though it lacks minerals.

Regional planning begins by drawing this map honestly and then asking three questions for each region: what does it have in surplus, what does it lack, and what can be developed in situ and what must be brought in or sent out. Mineral regions need transport to carry ore out and power and water to process it locally, so that value is added where the ore is; otherwise the region remains a raw material colony. Water-rich regions need dams and transmission lines; energy-rich dry regions need water conservation and solar parks; scenic regions need tourism with strict environmental limits.

Within Odisha the same principle applies to its four natural regions. The coastal plain has fertile alluvium, water and dense population; its plan stresses irrigation, flood and cyclone protection, fisheries, ports and agro-industry. The northern plateau of Sundargarh, Keonjhar and Mayurbhanj has iron ore, manganese, chromite and forests; its plan stresses mining with restoration, steel and value addition, and forest protection with tribal rights. The Eastern Ghats of Koraput, Rayagada and Kalahandi have bauxite, forests and a large tribal population; their plan must balance the aluminium industry with the protection of hills and the livelihoods of forest dwellers. The central tableland and coal belt of Angul, Dhenkanal and Jharsuguda are the base of thermal power and heavy industry, and their plan must deal with air pollution, water demand and rehabilitation.

Regional planning also means linking the regions. Ore from the plateau goes to steel plants at Rourkela and Kalinganagar and to the port at Paradip; power from the coal belt goes to the whole state; rice from the delta feeds the hills. Transport, energy and trade are the sinews of regional planning, which is why the last units of this course deal with them.

Development and conservation are often spoken of as opposites, but in sustainable development they are one process. Conservation is the management of resources so that they yield the greatest lasting benefit while being maintained for the future. It is not the same as preservation, which means leaving a resource untouched; conservation means using wisely.

Conservation is needed at every level. At the international level it takes the form of conventions on climate, biodiversity, wetlands and endangered species, and of agreements on the sharing of rivers and seas. At the national level it takes the form of laws and policies: the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972, the Forest Conservation Act of 1980, the Environment Protection Act of 1986, the National Forest Policy of 1988 with its target of one-third of the land under forest, the National Water Policy, and the rules requiring environmental clearance for mines and industries. At the state level Odisha has its forest, mining and water departments, the State Pollution Control Board, the Chilika Development Authority, and the joint forest management programme in which thousands of village committees protect forests and share their produce. At the community level stand the self-initiated forest protection groups of Nayagarh, Dhenkanal and Mayurbhanj, the fishermen's associations of Chilika and the pani panchayats that manage canal water. At the individual level every person decides how much water, fuel and material to use.

The methods of conservation differ by resource. For minerals and fossil fuels: efficient use, recovery of low grades, recycling of metals, substitution by renewable energy, and the investment of income in lasting assets. For forests: protection of existing cover, afforestation, controlled felling, social forestry and community management. For wildlife: protected areas, bans on hunting and trade, and corridors. For water: rainwater harvesting, watershed development, recharge of groundwater, efficient irrigation and treatment of waste water. For soil: contour bunding, terracing, cover crops and shelter belts. For land: control of urban sprawl, reclamation of wasteland and mined land. Each of these will be met again in the units that follow.

A conservation measure succeeds only when the people who depend on the resource gain from it. Forests protected by force are cut at night; forests protected by villagers who receive fuel, fodder and a share of timber grow back. This lesson from Odisha's own experience, that conservation must be participatory, is now a principle of national policy.

Odisha's experience of resource development since independence shows both the promise and the price of the process.

The early plans. When Odisha became a separate province in 1936 it was overwhelmingly agricultural, flood-prone and poor. The First and Second Five Year Plans brought two projects that changed the state. The Hirakud dam on the Mahanadi, begun in 1948 and inaugurated in 1957, was among the first great multipurpose projects of independent India; it controls the floods of the delta, irrigates the Sambalpur-Bargarh plain, and generates power at Burla and Chiplima. The Rourkela steel plant, built with German collaboration and commissioned in 1959, was the first of the public sector steel plants; it used the iron ore of Sundargarh and Keonjhar, the coal of Jharia and the limestone of Sundargarh, and it created a modern industrial town.

Mining and heavy industry. From the 1960s the state's minerals were opened up on a large scale: iron ore in Keonjhar, Sundargarh and Mayurbhanj; chromite in Sukinda; manganese in Sundargarh and Koraput; coal at Talcher and later the Ib valley. Nalco, established in 1981, built the Panchpatmali bauxite mine, the Damanjodi refinery and the Angul smelter. Thermal power stations at Talcher and Ib valley made Odisha a power-surplus state. Paradip port, opened in 1966, became the outlet for ore and coal. Since the 1990s private steel, aluminium, ferro-alloy and power plants have come up at Kalinganagar, Jharsuguda, Angul and elsewhere, and Odisha is now India's leading producer of steel and aluminium as well as of many minerals.

Water and agriculture. Rengali on the Brahmani, Upper Kolab, Upper Indravati and Balimela in the south, and hundreds of medium and minor projects expanded irrigation. Yet only about a third of the cultivated area is irrigated, and agriculture remains rain-fed and vulnerable to drought in the west and floods and cyclones on the coast.

The price. The same projects displaced lakhs of people, a large share of them tribal. Mining scarred hills and silted rivers; industrial belts suffer air and water pollution; forests were lost; and for many years the benefits of the state's minerals flowed out while poverty remained. The Shah Commission report of 2013 exposed illegal mining on a large scale.

The turn. Since the 1990s Odisha has moved toward more balanced development: community and joint forest management, the restoration of Chilika, protected areas for Similipal, Bhitarkanika and Gahirmatha, District Mineral Foundations to spend royalties locally, cyclone shelters and early warning that have cut deaths dramatically, and growing solar power. The task ahead is to convert its non-renewable wealth into lasting human and infrastructural assets before the ore runs out, and to protect the renewable base of forest, water and soil on which most of its people still depend.

No account of resource development in Odisha is complete without the problem of displacement, because it is the point at which the social pillar of sustainable development has most often given way.

Every large project takes land. A reservoir submerges villages; a mine removes a hill and the fields around it; a steel plant needs thousands of acres; a port and its roads take the coast. The people who lived there, often for generations, must move. In Odisha the great majority of those displaced have been tribal and other forest-dependent communities, who hold land by custom rather than by paper title, depend on the commons of forest and river that no compensation covers, and find it hardest to start again elsewhere. It has been estimated that development projects in the state have displaced well over fifteen lakh people since independence.

The Hirakud reservoir submerged nearly 250 villages and displaced about 1.5 lakh people, many of whom received little or nothing. The Rourkela plant displaced about thirty villages of the Sundargarh tribal belt. Rengali, Upper Indravati, Upper Kolab and Balimela repeated the pattern in the 1970s and 1980s, with resettled families often placed on poor land far from their old forests. The mining belts of Keonjhar and Sundargarh and the industrial areas of Kalinganagar and Jharsuguda have seen protests and, at Kalinganagar in 2006, deaths.

The response has slowly improved. Odisha adopted a Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy in 2006, one of the first states to do so, providing land, house sites, jobs or compensation, and shares in project benefits. The national Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act of 2013 requires consent of affected families, social impact assessment and higher compensation. The Forest Rights Act of 2006 recognises the rights of forest dwellers and requires the consent of the gram sabha for the diversion of forest land. The District Mineral Foundation, created under the 2015 amendment of the mines law, receives a share of mining royalty to be spent on the health, education, water and livelihoods of the affected areas; Odisha's foundations have the largest collections in the country.

The principle that emerges is that those who bear the cost of a resource must share in its benefit. A project whose gains go to distant cities while its losses fall on the people at the site is neither just nor, in the long run, stable. Sustainable development in a mineral state therefore means not only protecting the environment but also securing the rights and the future of the communities who live where the resources are.

The lesson closes by drawing its threads together into a direction for the future, of the kind that examination questions on resource development in Odisha often ask.

Turn non-renewable wealth into renewable wealth. Iron ore, bauxite, chromite and coal will not last forever; at present rates some of Odisha's high-grade deposits will be exhausted within a few generations. The income they yield must be invested in assets that last: schools, technical institutes, hospitals, roads, irrigation, and above all the skills of the young. A district that spends its royalty on education will still be prosperous when the mines close; one that spends it on consumption will not.

Add value within the state. Exporting raw ore gives the least return and the most damage. Steel, aluminium, ferro-alloys, engineering goods and the downstream industries that use them create employment and revenue many times greater. The state's policy of tying mining leases to local processing follows this logic.

Protect the renewable base. The majority of Odisha's people still live by farming, forest produce and fishing. Forest cover must be maintained and expanded through community management; watersheds in the western uplands must be treated to hold rain; the coast must be defended by mangroves and shelter belts; Chilika, Bhitarkanika and Similipal must be guarded. Mined land must be restored, and mining in ecologically sensitive hills should be avoided.

Use energy wisely. Coal-based thermal power has made Odisha power-surplus but at a cost in pollution and carbon. Solar power, for which the western districts have great potential, small hydro, and energy efficiency in the state's heavy industries are the sustainable path.

Plan for climate change. A rising sea, stronger cyclones, erratic monsoons and hotter summers will hit Odisha harder than most states. Resource plans must build in coastal protection, drought-proofing, heat action and disaster preparedness, in which the state is already a national model.

Put people first. Consent, fair compensation, rehabilitation, the recognition of forest rights and local spending of mineral revenue are not obstacles to development but its conditions. Development that the people of a place oppose does not last.

The sum of these is sustainable development applied to one state. Odisha has the natural base to be one of the most prosperous parts of India; whether it becomes so depends on the technology it builds, the institutions it strengthens and the wisdom with which it plans. That is the subject of the whole of this course, and the reason a student of geography in Odisha should study it with care.