Bhubaneswar: BJD president Naveen Patnaik Sunday expressed “disappointment” over the provisions made for Odisha in the Union Budget and said the state gets allocations only for the extraction of its natural resources, with little focus on people’s welfare.
Odisha and its people deserve more and better from the Union Budget, Patnaik said while reacting to the Budget presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in Parliament earlier in the day.
“As seen from the entirety of the Union Budget, Odisha is getting allocations only for taking its natural resources away and is completely ignored when it comes to resource allocation for benefit of people of the state,” he said.
“I express my disappointment on the #Budget2026 presented today by the Union Government. The budget has offered no noteworthy benefits to #Odisha and its people,” he said in a social media post.
He said the people of Odisha expected that the double-engine government would provide a growth momentum with a focus on infrastructure, job creation and additional allocations due to the state, but “the state has received very little”.
However, Patnaik welcomed the proposal for the establishment of the Rare Earth Corridor in Odisha. He said the state is the leading producer of several key minerals and will always contribute to nation-building through its rich resources.
The five-time former chief minister noted that the Budget again announced National Waterways to connect mineral-rich areas and industrial centres to ports, but said the proposal was a decade old and there has been “no progress on the ground”.
Patnaik also said that it was a huge disappointment that the announcement to develop seven High-Speed Rail corridors between cities as ‘growth connectors’ does not feature Odisha.
The BJD chief alleged that Odisha’s BJP government had “nipped the Bhubaneswar Metro project earlier” and that the neglect of people’s needs had continued.
He said, “It’s quite baffling that the tourism-centric scheme for development of Buddhist Circuits has completely skipped Odisha despite having several very important Buddhist sites, including our Diamond Triangle.”
