Chapter 13 — ପରିବହନ, ଯୋଗଯୋଗ ଏବଂ ବାଣିଜ୍ୟ

Goods and services do not move from supply locales to demand locales on their own. The movement of these goods and services from their supply locations to demand locations necessitates the need for transport. Some people are engaged in facilitating these movements; they are known to be the traders who make the products come to the consumers by transportation. Thus the pace of development of a country depends upon the production of goods and services as well as their movement over space. Therefore, efficient means of transport are prerequisites for fast development. Movement of these goods and services can be over three important domains of our earth: land, water and air. Based on these, transport can also be classified into land, water and air transport. Land transport includes roads, railways and pipelines; water transport includes inland waterways on rivers and canals and ocean shipping; air transport includes domestic and international airways.

For a long time, trade and transport were restricted to a limited space. With the passage of time, the development of transport and communication in the last two centuries has made the world a global village. Today, the world has been converted into a large village with the help of efficient and fast moving transport. Transport has been able to achieve this through the development of better means of communication: today the trader in Cuttack can order goods from Mumbai by telephone or internet, track the lorry carrying them by satellite, and pay by electronic transfer, none of which was possible fifty years ago. Trade, transport and communication are therefore three sides of one triangle: trade creates the demand for movement, transport carries the goods, and communication carries the information that organises both.

Transport and communication are called the lifelines of the national economy for several reasons. They link the farm to the market and the mine to the factory, so that surplus in one region relieves scarcity in another; they widen the market for every producer, so that industry can grow to the size that efficiency requires; they carry food, medicine and relief to areas struck by flood, cyclone or drought, as the roads and railways of Odisha did after the 1999 super cyclone; they enable the movement of labour, students, pilgrims and tourists; they bind the regions and peoples of a large country into one nation, which is why the railways and the national highways are called the arteries of India; and they are essential for defence, the Border Roads Organisation being the clearest example. India is well-linked with the rest of the world despite its vast size, diversity and linguistic and socio-cultural plurality, and railways, airways, water ways, newspapers, radio, television, cinema and internet have been contributing to its socio-economic progress in many ways. The trades from local to international levels have added to the vitality of its economy; it has enriched our life and added substantially to growing amenities and facilities for the comforts of life. The rest of the chapter examines each of these lifelines in turn, beginning with the roads that reach the largest number of Indians.

India has one of the largest road networks in the world, aggregating over 63 lakh km. In India, roadways have preceded railways; they still have an edge over railways in view of the ease with which they can be built and maintained. The growing importance of road transport vis-à-vis rail transport is rooted in the following reasons: (a) the construction cost of roads is much lower than that of railway lines; (b) roads can traverse comparatively more dissected and undulating topography; (c) roads can negotiate higher gradients of slopes and as such can traverse mountains such as the Himalayas; (d) road transport is economical in transportation of few persons and relatively smaller amounts of goods over short distances; (e) it also provides door-to-door service, thus the cost of loading and unloading is much lower; and (f) road transport is also used as a feeder to other modes of transport, such as providing a link between railway stations, air and sea ports. In India roads are classified into six classes according to their capacity.

Golden Quadrilateral Super Highways. The government has launched a major road development project linking Delhi–Kolkata–Chennai–Mumbai and Delhi by six-lane super highways. The North–South corridor linking Srinagar (Jammu and Kashmir) and Kanniyakumari (Tamil Nadu), and the East–West corridor connecting Silchar (Assam) and Porbandar (Gujarat), are part of this project. The major objective of these super highways is to reduce the time and distance between the mega cities of India. These highway projects are being implemented by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI). The Golden Quadrilateral's eastern side, Kolkata–Chennai, runs down the whole Odisha coast through Balasore, Bhadrak, Cuttack, Bhubaneswar, Khurda and Berhampur as NH 16.

National Highways link extreme parts of the country. These are the primary road systems and are laid and maintained by the Central Public Works Department (CPWD). A number of major national highways run in north–south and east–west directions. The historical Sher Shah Suri Marg is called National Highway No. 1, between Delhi and Amritsar (now NH 44 under the new numbering). NH 7 (now NH 44) from Varanasi to Kanniyakumari is the longest. State Highways linking a state capital with different district headquarters are constructed and maintained by the State Public Works Department (PWD). District Roads connect the district headquarters with other places of the district and are maintained by the Zila Parishad. Other roads are rural roads which link rural areas and villages with towns; these roads received special impetus under the Pradhan Mantri Grameen Sadak Yojana (2000), under which special provisions are made so that every village in the country is linked to a major town by an all-weather motorable road. Border Roads are built by the Border Roads Organisation, a government of India undertaking established in 1960 for the development of roads of strategic importance in the northern and north-eastern border areas; this organisation has improved accessibility in areas of difficult terrain and has helped in the economic development of these areas, building roads such as the Manali–Leh highway at over 5,000 m. Roads are also classified by the material used: metalled roads of cement, concrete or bitumen, which are all-weather, and unmetalled roads of earth, which go out of use in the rainy season.

Road density is the length of road per 100 sq km of area. The distribution of roads is not uniform in the country: density of all roads varies from only about 12.14 km in Jammu and Kashmir to over 500 km in Kerala, with the national average of about 142 km per 100 sq km (2011). The plains, with dense population, level land and intensive agriculture, have close networks; the hills, deserts and forests have sparse ones. Odisha's road density is above the national average in length because of its dense network of rural roads, but a large share of its roads are unmetalled and many bridges and culverts are missing on the district roads, so that in the monsoon parts of Kandhamal, Malkangiri and Mayurbhanj are cut off.

Road transportation in India faces a number of problems. Keeping in view the volume of traffic and passengers, the road network is inadequate; India has the second largest network in the world but much of it is single-lane and rural. About half of the roads are unmetalled, and this limits their usage during the rainy season. The national highways are inadequate too: they form only about two per cent of the road length but carry about 40 per cent of the traffic, and are choked with slow and fast vehicles moving together. Moreover, the roadways are highly congested in cities, and most of the bridges and culverts are old and narrow; Bhubaneswar, Cuttack and Rourkela have the traffic jams of cities twice their size. India's roads are also among the most dangerous in the world, with over 1.5 lakh deaths a year in accidents, caused by mixed traffic, poor road design, overloaded lorries and careless driving. Encroachment on the road margins by shops and houses, the absence of footpaths, the lack of parking and the pollution of vehicle exhausts add to the urban problem.

The remedies lie in the road development programmes already begun: the widening of the national highways to four and six lanes with divided carriageways and bypasses around towns under the National Highways Development Project and the later Bharatmala programme; the surfacing of all rural roads and their linking to every habitation under the Pradhan Mantri Grameen Sadak Yojana; expressways between the largest cities; flyovers, ring roads and bus systems in cities; toll financing and private participation in building highways; the strict enforcement of the Motor Vehicles Act on speed, loading and licences; and the coordination of road with rail and water transport so that long-distance bulk goods go by rail and the roads are freed for what they do best. In Odisha the widening of NH 16 and the Sambalpur–Cuttack, Cuttack–Paradip and Bhubaneswar–Puri roads, the Biju Expressway through the western districts, the coastal highway and the bridges over the Mahanadi and Brahmani are the current projects. Because road transport is the mode that reaches the door of every Indian, its improvement is the most direct way to raise the income of the village.

Railways are the principal mode of transportation for freight and passengers in India. Railways also make it possible to conduct multifarious activities like business, sightseeing, pilgrimage along with transportation of goods over longer distances. Apart from an important means of transport the Indian Railways have been a great integrating force for more than 150 years: railways in India bind the economic life of the country as well as accelerate the development of the industry and agriculture. The first train steamed off from Mumbai to Thane in 1853, covering a distance of 34 km, and by 1900 the lines had reached every major city, built by the British to move cotton, jute, coal and troops. The Indian Railway is now the largest public sector undertaking in the country and one of the largest railway systems in the world, with about 68,000 route km, over 7,300 stations, about 13,000 passenger trains and 8,000 goods trains a day, carrying over two crore passengers and about 40 lakh tonnes of freight daily, and employing over 12 lakh people. It is reorganised into 17 zones (18 with the newest), each with divisions: Northern, North Eastern, Northeast Frontier, Eastern, South Eastern, South Central, Southern, Central, Western, South Western, North Western, West Central, North Central, South East Central, East Coast, East Central and the Kolkata Metro. The East Coast Railway, with its headquarters at Bhubaneswar and divisions at Khurda Road, Sambalpur and Waltair, was created in 2003 and covers most of Odisha; it carries more freight, chiefly iron ore, coal and steel, than almost any other zone and earns the highest freight revenue of all.

Indian railway lines were laid to three gauges, that is, widths between the rails: broad gauge (1.676 m), the standard for the main lines; metre gauge (1.000 m), once common in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Assam and Tamil Nadu; and narrow gauge (0.762 m and 0.610 m) on hill lines such as the Darjeeling Himalayan, Kalka–Shimla and Nilgiri Mountain railways. The Project Unigauge since 1992 has converted almost all metre and narrow gauge lines to broad gauge, so that goods and passengers no longer change trains at the break of gauge. Traction has changed from steam to diesel and now to electricity: over 90 per cent of the broad gauge is electrified, which saves imported oil. The Konkan Railway along the western coast from Roha to Mangaluru (1998), the Jammu–Baramulla line with the Chenab bridge, the dedicated freight corridors from Dadri to Mumbai and from Ludhiana to Dankuni, the metro railways of the large cities and the Vande Bharat and forthcoming bullet trains are the newest developments.

The distribution pattern of the railway network in the country has been largely influenced by physiographic, economic and administrative factors. The northern plains with their vast level land, high population density and rich agricultural resources provided the most favourable condition for their growth; however, a large number of rivers requiring the construction of bridges across their wide beds posed some obstacles. In the hilly terrains of the peninsular region, railway tracks are laid through low hills, gaps or tunnels. The Himalayan mountainous regions too are unfavourable for the construction of railway lines due to high relief, sparse population and lack of economic opportunities. Likewise, it was difficult to lay railway lines on the sandy plain of western Rajasthan, the swamps of Gujarat, the forested tracks of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Jharkhand. The contiguous stretch of Sahyadri could be crossed only through gaps or passes, and the Konkan line required 2,000 bridges and 92 tunnels. In Odisha the coast and the Mahanadi valley got lines early (the Howrah–Chennai line reached Cuttack in 1899), while the Eastern Ghats districts of Kandhamal, Gajapati and Nabarangpur are still without a railway.

Problems of the railways. Rail transport suffers from certain problems as well. Many passengers travel without tickets, which costs the railways hundreds of crores a year. Thefts and damaging of railway property, from fittings in coaches to signalling cable, have not yet stopped completely. People stop the trains, pull the chain unnecessarily, and this causes heavy damage to the railway and delays to thousands of others. Beyond these, the railways face structural problems: the trunk routes between the four metros are saturated, so that goods trains wait for passenger trains and the average speed of freight is barely 25 km per hour; the loss on passenger fares is cross-subsidised by freight charges, which drives bulk goods to the roads; safety is threatened by old tracks, unmanned level crossings and worn rolling stock, and accidents occur every year; the modernisation of signalling, the replacement of old coaches and the electrification of all lines need capital the railways cannot always find; and the network has not reached many backward regions. The dedicated freight corridors, the automatic train protection system 'Kavach', the removal of level crossings, the LHB coaches and the station redevelopment programme are the answers under way.

Pipelines. Pipeline transport network is a new arrival on the transportation map of India. In the past, these were used to transport water to cities and industries. Now, these are used for transporting crude oil, petroleum products and natural gas from oil and natural gas fields to refineries, fertiliser factories and big thermal power plants; solids can also be transported through a pipeline when converted into slurry, as iron ore from Kudremukh was pumped to Mangaluru and as the Kirandul–Visakhapatnam and the Keonjhar–Paradip ore pipelines do. The far inland locations of refineries like Barauni, Mathura, Panipat and gas-based fertiliser plants could be thought of only because of pipelines. Initial cost of laying pipelines is high but subsequent running costs are minimal. It rules out trans-shipment losses or delays, works round the clock in all weather, uses no fuel for wheels, needs few workers and does not congest the roads or railways. There are three important networks of pipeline transportation in the country. (1) From the oil field in upper Assam to Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh), via Guwahati, Barauni and Allahabad; it has branches from Barauni to Haldia via Rajbandh, Rajbandh to Mourigram and Guwahati to Siliguri. (2) From Salaya in Gujarat to Jalandhar in Punjab, via Viramgam, Mathura, Delhi and Sonipat; it has branches to connect Koyali (near Vadodara), Chakshu and other places. (3) The gas pipeline from Hazira in Gujarat connects Jagdishpur in Uttar Pradesh, via Vijaipur in Madhya Pradesh; it has branches to Kota in Rajasthan, Shahjahanpur, Babrala and other places in Uttar Pradesh. The Mumbai High–Mumbai–Ankleshwar–Koyali oil line, the Paradip–Haldia–Durgapur and Paradip–Hyderabad product lines from the Paradip refinery, the Jagdishpur–Haldia–Bokaro–Dhamra gas line and the Kochi–Mangaluru–Bengaluru gas line are the newer networks, and over 40,000 km of pipelines now cross the country. Pipelines are the cheapest transport for liquids and gases, and their spread has freed thousands of railway wagons and road tankers for other goods.

Since the ancient times, India was one of the seafaring countries. Its seamen sailed far and near, thus, carrying and spreading Indian commerce and culture; Odisha's own sadhabas sailed from the Mahanadi mouth to Bali, Java and Sri Lanka, a memory kept alive every Kartik Purnima in the Bali Jatra of Cuttack. Waterways are the cheapest means of transport. They are most suitable for carrying heavy and bulky goods: a barge moves a tonne of goods for a fraction of the fuel a lorry needs, because water bears the weight. It is a fuel-efficient and environment-friendly mode of transport. Waterways are of two kinds: inland waterways on rivers, canals, backwaters and creeks, and ocean routes along the coast and across the seas.

India has inland navigation waterways of 14,500 km in length, but only about 5,700 km are navigable by mechanised vessels, because most Indian rivers are seasonal, shallow in the dry months, silted and interrupted by dams, barrages and low bridges. The following waterways have been declared as National Waterways by the government: National Waterway No. 1, the Ganga river between Allahabad and Haldia (1,620 km), on which barges carry coal, fly ash, food grain and fertiliser to and from the Farakka and Sahibganj terminals; National Waterway No. 2, the Brahmaputra river between Sadiya and Dhubri (891 km), which links Assam with the Kolkata port through Bangladesh; National Waterway No. 3, the West Coast Canal in Kerala from Kottapuram to Kollam along with the Udyogmandal and Champakkara canals (205 km), on the backwaters; National Waterway No. 4, a stretch of the Godavari and Krishna rivers along with the Kakinada–Puducherry canals (1,078 km); and National Waterway No. 5, a stretch of the Brahmani river along with the Matai river, the delta channels of the Mahanadi and Brahmani rivers and the East Coast Canal (588 km), which lies entirely in Odisha, running from Talcher down the Brahmani to the Dhamra mouth and along the East Coast Canal from Geonkhali to Charbatia, and is intended to carry Talcher coal and Kalinganagar steel to the sea. In 2016 the government declared 106 more rivers and canals as national waterways, a total of 111, of which several are in Odisha (the Mahanadi, the Baitarani, the Subarnarekha), though most await development. The Inland Waterways Authority of India (1986) develops them.

The other viable inland waterways include the Mandovi and Zuari of Goa, on which most of Goa's iron ore reaches Marmagao port by barge; the Sundarbans channels of West Bengal; the Barak in Assam; the backwaters (kadal) of Kerala, whose country boats and houseboats carry rice, coconut and tourists; and the tidal stretches of some other rivers. Inland water transport carries only about one per cent of India's freight against 10 to 20 per cent in Europe and China, because of the seasonal rivers, silting, the lack of terminals and the competition of roads and railways. Dredging, the building of jetties and river-sea vessels, and the Jal Marg Vikas project on the Ganga are the current efforts. In Odisha the ferries of the Mahanadi and Brahmani delta, the boats of Chilika lake and the proposed coal barges on National Waterway 5 are the inland water transport of the state.

India's trade with foreign countries is carried from the ports located along the coast: 95 per cent of the country's trade volume (68 per cent in terms of value) is moved by sea. With a long coastline of about 7,500 km, India is dotted with 12 major ports and about 200 notified non-major (minor and intermediate) ports. Major ports are under the Central government, non-major ports under the states. Shipping is the cheapest way to move goods over long distances, and the container has made it fast and secure.

West coast ports. Kandla in Kachchh, now Deendayal Port, was the first port developed soon after Independence to ease the volume of trade on the Mumbai port in the wake of the loss of Karachi port to Pakistan after Partition. Kandla is a tidal port and caters to the convenient handling of export and import cargo of the highly productive granary and industrial belt stretching across Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat; it is now the largest major port by cargo. Mumbai is the biggest port with a spacious natural and well-sheltered harbour, the gateway of India. The Jawaharlal Nehru port (Nhava Sheva) was planned with a view to decongest the Mumbai port and serve as a hub port for this region; it is the largest container port in India. Marmagao port in Goa is the premier iron ore exporting port of the country, accounting for about 50 per cent of India's iron ore export at its peak. New Mangalore port in Karnataka caters to the export of iron ore concentrates from Kudremukh mines and the trade of the Karnataka hinterland. Kochi in Kerala is the extreme south-western port, located at the entrance of a lagoon with a natural harbour, and now has the Vallarpadam container terminal and an LNG terminal.

East coast ports. Moving along the east coast, Tuticorin (V. O. Chidambaranar port) in Tamil Nadu is the extreme south-eastern port; it has a natural harbour and a rich hinterland, and a flourishing trade handling a large variety of cargoes to even our neighbouring countries like Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Chennai is one of the oldest artificial ports of the country and ranks next to Mumbai in terms of the volume of trade and cargo; Ennore (Kamarajar port) was developed as a satellite port to relieve it. Visakhapatnam is the deepest land-locked and well-protected port, originally conceived as an outlet for iron ore exports from Bailadila and now a large general port with a shipyard. Paradip in Odisha specialises in the export of iron ore and is described in the next section. Kolkata is an inland riverine port on the Hugli, 128 km from the sea; it serves a very large and rich hinterland of the Ganga–Brahmaputra basin, but being a tidal port it requires constant dredging of the Hugli. Haldia port was developed as a subsidiary port in order to relieve growing pressure on the Kolkata port, and together they form the Syama Prasad Mookerjee port. The twelfth major port is Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, and a new one is under construction at Vadhavan in Maharashtra. The large private non-major ports, Mundra and Pipavav in Gujarat, Krishnapatnam and Gangavaram in Andhra Pradesh and Dhamra and Gopalpur in Odisha, now handle almost as much cargo as the major ports. India's merchant fleet, the Shipping Corporation of India and the shipyards at Kochi, Visakhapatnam, Kolkata and Mumbai support the trade, and the Sagarmala programme aims to modernise the ports and link them to industrial corridors.

Paradip, at the mouth of the Mahanadi in Jagatsinghpur district, is Odisha's major port and one of the largest in India by cargo. It was the dream of the state's first Chief Minister after the merger, Biju Patnaik, who as a pilot had seen the empty coast from the air and pressed for a port that would give the mineral hinterland of Odisha its own outlet instead of depending on Kolkata and Visakhapatnam. Construction began in 1962, the first ship was loaded with iron ore in 1966, and Paradip was declared the eighth major port of India the same year. It is an artificial deep-water port built by dredging the coast and protecting the harbour with two long breakwaters, the north one 538 m and the south one 1,217 m, against the surf and cyclones of the Bay of Bengal; the harbour has a depth of about 18 m and can now receive Capesize ore carriers of over 1.5 lakh tonnes.

Paradip specialises in the export of iron ore, which it receives by rail from the mines of Keonjhar, Sundargarh and Mayurbhanj over the Cuttack–Paradip line and by the slurry pipeline from the Keonjhar pellet plants; it also exports chromite and ferro-alloys from Jajpur, alumina from Damanjodi, steel from Kalinganagar and Rourkela, and thermal coal from Talcher to the power stations of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh by coastal shipping, which has become its largest single cargo. Its imports are coking coal from Australia for the steel plants, crude oil for the Paradip refinery through a single-point mooring in the sea, rock phosphate, sulphur and ammonia for the Paradeep Phosphates fertiliser plant, and limestone, fertiliser and machinery. With over 130 million tonnes of cargo a year it is among the top three major ports of the country, and the Indian Oil refinery, the fertiliser plant, the petrochemical complex and the proposed steel plant have made Paradip an industrial town. Its problems are the silting of the approach channel, the cyclones that close the port for days every year, the pollution of the Mahanadi mouth and the loss of fishing grounds of the Jagatsinghpur villages.

Odisha's non-major ports have grown fast under the state's port policy. Dhamra, at the mouth of the Dhamra river in Bhadrak district, is a deep-water private port opened in 2011 with an 18 m draught; it handles coal, iron ore, fertiliser and containers, and has an LNG terminal for the gas pipeline into the state. Gopalpur in Ganjam, once a small port of the British era from which the coastal trade of southern Odisha and the pilgrims to Rangoon sailed, has been rebuilt as an all-weather deep port for the alumina and iron ore of the south and the industries of the Ganjam coast. Astaranga in Puri, Subarnarekha (Kirtania) in Balasore and others are planned, and there are fishing harbours at Paradip, Dhamra, Astaranga, Balaramgadi and Gopalpur. The 480 km coast, once thought to be without a good harbour, now gives Odisha three working deep-water ports, the foundation of its mineral and steel trade and of the coastal shipping of Talcher coal to the south.

The air travel, today, is the fastest, most comfortable and prestigious mode of transport. It can cover very difficult terrains like high mountains, dreary deserts, dense forests and also long oceanic stretches with great ease. Think of the north-eastern part of the country, marked with the presence of big rivers, dissected relief, dense forests and frequent floods and international frontiers, and you will see why air travel has made access easier: Itanagar, Aizawl, Imphal and the valleys of Arunachal are hours by air and days by road. Air transport was nationalised in 1953, when the private airlines were merged into Indian Airlines for domestic routes and Air India for international ones; after the opening of the skies in the 1990s, private airlines returned, and today IndiGo, Air India (now private and merged with Indian Airlines and Vistara), SpiceJet, Akasa and others carry over 15 crore domestic passengers a year, making India the third largest domestic aviation market in the world. Pawan Hans Helicopters provides helicopter services to the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation in its offshore operations, to inaccessible areas and difficult terrains like the north-eastern states and the interior parts of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, and to pilgrims at Vaishno Devi and Kedarnath. Air cargo carries the light and perishable goods of high value, flowers, fish, fruit, medicines, electronics and mail, and the diamonds of Surat.

The Airports Authority of India (1995) manages the airports, and the largest, Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Kochi, are run by public-private companies. India has about 30 international airports, of which Delhi (Indira Gandhi), Mumbai (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj), Kolkata (Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose), Chennai, Bengaluru (Kempegowda), Hyderabad (Rajiv Gandhi), Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, Ahmedabad, Guwahati and Amritsar are the busiest, and over a hundred domestic airports. The UDAN (Ude Desh ka Aam Nagrik) scheme since 2016 has opened small regional airports and subsidised fares so that towns like Jharsuguda, Rourkela, Jeypore and Utkela in Odisha have scheduled flights for the first time. Air transport is not within the reach of the common people in the way that buses and trains are; it is still costly, though the low-cost airlines have brought the fare on many routes close to that of an air-conditioned train, and it is mainly used for business, for long distances and for the north-east and the islands. Its other limits are the dependence on weather, the high fuel cost and the pollution and noise of the aircraft.

In Odisha, the Biju Patnaik International Airport at Bhubaneswar, named after the state's pilot Chief Minister, is the only international airport, with flights to Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai and abroad; Jharsuguda (Veer Surendra Sai airport) serves the industrial west; and airstrips at Rourkela, Jeypore, Utkela (Kalahandi), Rangeilunda (Berhampur) and Puri are being developed. The state's cyclones and floods have shown the value of the air link, since the helicopters that drop food to marooned villages of the delta fly from Bhubaneswar.

Ever since humans appeared on the earth, they have used different methods of communication, but the means of communication have undergone far-reaching changes. Long distance communication is far easier without physical movement of the communicator or receiver. Personal communication and mass communication including television, radio, press, films and the internet are the major means of communication in the country. Personal communication carries a message from one person to another; mass communication carries it from one source to millions at once.

Personal communication. The Indian postal network is the largest in the world, with over 1.5 lakh post offices, nine-tenths of them in villages, and its village postman still reaches places no other service does. It handles parcels as well as personal written communications. Cards and envelopes are considered first-class mail and are airlifted between stations covering both land and air. The second-class mail includes book packets, registered newspapers and periodicals; they are carried by surface mail, covering land and water transport. To facilitate quick delivery of mails in large towns and cities, six mail channels have been introduced recently; they are called Rajdhani Channel, Metro Channel, Green Channel, Business Channel, Bulk Mail Channel and Periodical Channel. Speed Post, money orders and the post office savings bank and insurance are its other services, and the India Post Payments Bank now takes banking to the village through the postman's mobile phone. India has one of the largest telecom networks in Asia. Excluding urban places, more than two-thirds of the villages in India have already been covered with Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD) telephone facility, and the government has made special provision to extend twenty-four hours STD facility to every village in the country, and there is a uniform rate of STD facilities all over India, made possible by integrating the development in space technology with communication technology. The landline telephone has since been overtaken by the mobile phone: India has over 115 crore mobile connections, among the largest in the world, and over 80 crore internet users, most of them on their phones, with the cheapest data in the world; the fibre-optic BharatNet reaches the gram panchayats, and satellite communication through INSAT links the remotest islands and hills. The mobile phone in the hand of the Odisha farmer, fisherman and migrant worker has changed the village more than any road.

Mass communication provides entertainment and creates awareness among people about various national programmes and policies. Radio: All India Radio (Akashvani) broadcasts a variety of programmes in national, regional and local languages for various categories of people spread over different parts of the country, and its Cuttack station has broadcast in Odia since 1948; private FM stations serve the cities and community radio the villages. Television: Doordarshan, the national television channel of India and one of the largest terrestrial networks in the world, broadcasts a variety of programmes from entertainment and educational to sports; its Odia channel DD Odia and hundreds of private satellite channels reach almost every home. The press: India publishes a large number of newspapers and periodicals annually; they are of different types depending upon their periodicity. Newspapers are published in about 100 languages and dialects, and India publishes the largest number of newspapers in the world; of these, the largest number are published in Hindi, followed by English and Urdu. Odia journalism began with the Utkal Dipika of Gouri Shankar Ray in 1866, and The Samaja (1919) of Gopabandhu Das is still among the state's leading dailies. Films: India is the largest producer of feature films in the world; it produces short films, video feature films and video short films, and the Central Board of Film Certification is the authority to certify both Indian and foreign films. Mass communication in India today is dominated by the internet, social media and streaming, which have joined the older media without replacing them.

The exchange of goods among people, states and countries is referred to as trade. The market is the place where such exchanges take place. Trade between two countries is called international trade; it may take place through sea, air or land routes. While local trade is carried in cities, towns and villages, state level trade is carried between two or more states. Advancement of international trade of a country is an index to its economic prosperity: it is, therefore, considered the economic barometer for a country. As the resources are space bound, no country can survive without international trade; India has to import petroleum, machinery and gold and export the things it makes best.

Export and import are the components of trade. The balance of trade of a country is the difference between its export and import. When the value of export exceeds the value of imports, it is called a favourable balance of trade; on the contrary, if the value of imports exceeds the value of exports, it is termed as unfavourable balance of trade. India's balance of trade has been unfavourable for most years since Independence, chiefly because of its oil imports, and the gap is met by the earnings from services (software, BPO), by the remittances of Indians working abroad and by foreign investment; the wider account that includes these is the balance of payments.

India has trade relations with all the major trading blocks and all geographical regions of the world. Among the commodities of export, whose share has been increasing over the years, are agriculture and allied products (rice, spices, marine products, tea, coffee, cotton), ores and minerals (iron ore, chromite, alumina), gems and jewellery (diamonds cut in Surat), chemical and allied products (pharmaceuticals, organic chemicals), engineering goods (machinery, vehicles, auto parts, the largest group) and petroleum products from the refineries, along with textiles and garments, leather and software services. The commodities imported to India include petroleum and petroleum products (the largest item, about a quarter of all imports), pearls and precious stones for cutting, inorganic chemicals, coal, coke and briquettes, machinery, gold and silver, electronic goods, fertilisers and edible oil. Bulk imports as a group registered a growth accounting for a large share of India's total imports: it includes fertilisers, cereals, edible oils and newsprint. China, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Russia and the countries of the European Union are the largest trading partners; the United States is the largest buyer of Indian goods and China the largest seller to India. International trade has undergone a sea change in the last fifteen years: exchange of commodities and goods has been superseded by the exchange of information and knowledge. India has emerged as a software giant at the international level and is earning large foreign exchange through the export of information technology. Odisha's share of India's trade is in ores, ferro-alloys, alumina, steel, marine products and cashew through Paradip, Dhamra, Gopalpur and Visakhapatnam, and in the software exported from Bhubaneswar.

Tourism in India has grown substantially over the last three decades. Foreign tourist arrivals have risen to over one crore a year in the best years, and domestic tourists number far more, with about 240 crore visits recorded within the country. Tourism earns foreign exchange of over 30 billion dollars a year and is counted among the country's largest export industries, because the foreign tourist pays in dollars for Indian services. More than 15 million people are directly engaged in the tourism industry, in hotels, restaurants, transport, guiding, handicrafts, travel agencies and the informal trades around every monument and beach, and many more indirectly. Tourism also promotes national integration, provides support to local handicrafts and cultural pursuits, helps in the development of international understanding about our culture and heritage, and spreads income to regions with few other resources. Foreign tourists visit India for heritage tourism (the forts, temples and monuments), eco-tourism (the national parks and hills), adventure tourism (trekking, rafting, skiing), cultural tourism (festivals, music, dance), medical tourism (India's hospitals treat lakhs of foreign patients at low cost), and business tourism. Rajasthan, Goa, Jammu and Kashmir, the temple towns of south India and the Himalayan hill stations are the main destinations, and Kerala's backwaters and Ayurveda have made it a brand. There is vast potential for the development of tourism in all these areas, and the Incredible India campaign, visa on arrival, the improvement of airports and the tourist trains such as the Palace on Wheels are the means.

Odisha has a rich tourist wealth that it has only begun to exploit. The Golden Triangle of Bhubaneswar (the Lingaraj, Mukteswar and Rajarani temples, the Udayagiri and Khandagiri caves and the Dhauli peace pagoda), Puri (the Jagannath temple, the Rath Yatra that draws over ten lakh pilgrims and the beach) and Konark (the Sun Temple, a World Heritage Site) is the core, visited by lakhs every year. Beyond it lie the Chilika lake with its dolphins and migratory birds at Nalabana, the beaches of Gopalpur and Chandipur, the Similipal tiger reserve and biosphere, the Bhitarkanika mangroves and crocodiles, the olive ridley turtle nesting at Gahirmatha and Rushikulya, the Buddhist sites of Ratnagiri, Lalitgiri and Udayagiri, the Hirakud dam and the waterfalls of Khandadhar and Duduma, the hot springs of Taptapani and Atri, the tribal villages and markets of Koraput and Kandhamal, the Hirapur Chausath Yogini temple, the Sambalpuri handloom villages and the handicraft village of Raghurajpur, and the festivals of Rath Yatra, Konark dance, Bali Jatra and Dhanu Jatra. Odisha Tourism promotes these with Panthanivas rest houses, eco-retreats and the Bhubaneswar–Puri–Konark road, and the state earns most from domestic pilgrims. Its limitations are the small number of foreign visitors, the cyclone season, poor hotels outside the triangle and the distance of the tribal and forest districts from the airport. Tourism, since it exports Odisha's heritage without moving it, is the trade the state can grow fastest.

Odisha's development has been shaped by the state of its transport, because a state that produces ore, coal, steel, aluminium, rice and fish for distant markets lives or dies by its ability to move them. The roads of the state total over 2.5 lakh km, but most are rural and district roads; the national highways are its arteries: NH 16 (the old NH 5), the Kolkata–Chennai arm of the Golden Quadrilateral down the coast through Balasore, Bhadrak, Cuttack, Bhubaneswar and Berhampur; NH 55 (old NH 42) from Cuttack through Dhenkanal, Angul and Sambalpur to Chhattisgarh; NH 53 (old NH 6) across the north from Baripada through Keonjhar and Sundargarh to Sambalpur; NH 20 (old NH 23) from Rourkela through Keonjhar to Angul; NH 26 (old NH 43) from Raipur through Nabarangpur and Koraput to Visakhapatnam; NH 57 (old NH 201) through Bolangir and Kalahandi; NH 316 Bhubaneswar–Puri; and the state's own Biju Expressway through the western districts. The Odisha State Road Transport Corporation and private buses carry passengers, and the lorries of the ore belt make the Keonjhar–Paradip and Rourkela–Kolkata roads the busiest and most dangerous in the state. Bhubaneswar, Cuttack and Rourkela have city bus services and the twin cities are joined by four bridges over the Kathajodi and Kuakhai.

The railways of Odisha are run by the East Coast Railway from its headquarters at Bhubaneswar, through the Khurda Road and Sambalpur divisions, with the South Eastern Railway's Chakradharpur division serving Rourkela and the Waltair division the south. The Howrah–Chennai main line runs down the coast through Balasore, Bhadrak, Jajpur-Keonjhar Road, Cuttack, Bhubaneswar, Khurda Road, Balugaon and Berhampur, the busiest passenger line; the Howrah–Mumbai line crosses the north through Rourkela and Jharsuguda; the Cuttack–Sambalpur line through Talcher and Angul, the Khurda Road–Bolangir line under construction, the Sambalpur–Titlagarh–Koraput–Rayagada–Vizianagaram lines through the interior, the Kottavalasa–Kirandul ore line through Koraput and the Cuttack–Paradip and Haridaspur–Paradip ore lines complete the network. The state has over 2,800 route km, almost all electrified, and the railways carry its iron ore, coal, steel, alumina and rice. Districts of the Eastern Ghats such as Kandhamal, Gajapati, Boudh and Nabarangpur are still without a railway line.

The ports of Paradip, Dhamra and Gopalpur and the airports of Bhubaneswar and Jharsuguda have been described above, and National Waterway 5 on the Brahmani and the East Coast Canal waits for development. Pipelines from the Paradip refinery to Haldia and Hyderabad, the Keonjhar–Paradip ore slurry line and the Jagdishpur–Dhamra gas line are the newest links. In communication, Odisha has one of the largest rural post office networks, All India Radio at Cuttack, Bhubaneswar, Sambalpur, Berhampur, Jeypore and Rourkela, Doordarshan Odia, over 3 crore mobile connections, BharatNet fibre to the panchayats and a growing internet economy centred on Bhubaneswar. The state's task is to carry this network into the interior: the railway to Kandhamal and Nabarangpur, all-weather roads to every hamlet of the Eastern Ghats, the coastal highway and the mobile tower in every tribal village, so that the mineral wealth of the north and the rice of the coast are joined by the hills of the south in one connected Odisha.