Gorakhpur

Gorakhpur runs on monks and migration. The Gorakhnath Math, a monastery founded around the 11th century, has shaped the city's identity for a millennium—and from 1989 to 2014 delivered every general election to its presiding monk or his chosen successor. Mahant Avaidyanath won three consecutive terms; his successor Yogi Adityanath won five straight from 1998 before becoming Uttar Pradesh's Chief Minister in 2017. Few cities anywhere have their political destiny so thoroughly locked into a single religious institution—a case of path-dependence so deep it predates the nation-state itself.

But the Math's spiritual gravity masks an economic reality: Gorakhpur is Purvanchal's largest city and its primary labor export terminal. The railway junction—a hub-and-spoke node handling over 250 trains daily on what was once the world's longest platform at 1,366 meters—doesn't primarily bring people in. It ships them out. Millions of workers from the surrounding districts pass through Gorakhpur en route to Delhi, Mumbai, and Gujarat's factory floors. Hundreds of thousands return during peak reverse migration periods. The remittances they send back make Gorakhpur a source-sink economy: exporting labor, importing cash. Like a honeybee colony where foragers die far from the hive while the colony survives on the nectar they carry home, the city thrives on the earnings of workers who may never return.

The city's infrastructure deficit became nationally visible in August 2017, when 30 children died within 48 hours at BRD Medical College after the oxygen supply was cut over unpaid bills of roughly ₹68 lakh (about $100,000). A hospital serving as the primary treatment center for eastern UP's encephalitis belt, dependent on a single oxygen supplier, collapsed the moment an invoice went unpaid—a phase transition triggered by a purchase order.

That crisis had deep roots. The Gorakhpur region's first encephalitis epidemic struck in 1978, and BRD Medical College recorded over 25,000 child deaths across the following four decades. The hospital received thousands of acute encephalitis cases annually from 15 surrounding districts while chronically understaffed—by 2009, only 36 of 135 encephalitis staff hired remained on regular salary. The 2017 oxygen failure was not an anomaly—it was the point where chronic underinvestment finally became acute.

The political response was transformative. Post-crisis investments include AIIMS Gorakhpur, an ₹8,600 crore fertilizer plant revival through HURL, and the 91-kilometer Gorakhpur Link Expressway connecting the city to the national highway grid. AES cases plummeted from 764 in 2017 to 47 by 2024. The Global Investors Summit attracted ₹1.71 lakh crore in investment commitments for the Gorakhpur region.

Source-sink theory predicts what happens next. When a sink population depends on subsidies from a source, cutting the subsidy collapses the sink. Gorakhpur's investment boom is subsidized by political patronage from a Chief Minister who represents the city's monastery. If that patronage shifts, the source-sink math reasserts itself: a transit city for people heading somewhere else, sustained by the money they send back.