Bhubaneswar

In 262 BCE, the Kalinga War killed over 100,000 soldiers on the plains outside what is now Bhubaneswar. The carnage so disturbed the conquering emperor Ashoka that he abandoned military expansion, embraced Buddhism, and inscribed his remorse in rock edicts that still stand at Dhauli, seven kilometres from the city centre. A war's aftermath shaped a civilisation's moral architecture. Twenty-two centuries later, the same city administers 40% of India's total mineral wealth from an air-conditioned office district designed by a German architect.

Bhubaneswar operates a double extraction economy without getting its hands dirty. Odisha holds 98% of India's chromite reserves, 50% of its bauxite, 34% of its iron ore, and vast coal deposits. Mining contributes 8.5% to the state's GDP. But the mines are in western and northern Odisha — hundreds of kilometres from the capital. Bhubaneswar houses the Directorate of Mines, negotiates the MoUs with steel companies, collects the royalties, and hosts the corporate offices. It captures the administrative and regulatory rent while the extraction and environmental damage happen elsewhere. The biological analogy is precise: Bhubaneswar is the brain of the organism, directing resource flows without bearing the metabolic cost.

The city's second identity is equally improbable. Bhubaneswar is the only Tier-2 city in India to host all five of the country's largest IT companies — Infosys, Wipro, TCS, Tech Mahindra, and Mindtree — alongside Accenture and Cognizant. Over seventy IT companies have established operations here in the past seven years. The value proposition is arbitrage against Bangalore and Hyderabad: comparable talent, lower attrition rates, dramatically lower real estate costs, and a quality of life that includes 700 temples spanning two millennia of continuous construction.

This is where the planned capital story becomes relevant. Jawaharlal Nehru laid the foundation stone on April 13, 1948. German architect Otto Konigsberger designed the city from scratch, replacing flood-prone Cuttack as Odisha's capital. The plan preserved ancient temple zones while creating modern administrative and commercial sectors — a spatial separation that allowed the Temple City brand and the IT hub brand to coexist without competing for the same land.

Bhubaneswar demonstrates niche construction at the state level: a capital deliberately engineered to capture high-value functions — governance, mineral administration, technology services — while outsourcing the messy, land-intensive, environmentally costly activities to other cities. The result is a clean, growing, temple-studded capital that manages India's largest mineral portfolio from behind a desk.