By Sandip Pati
People in government and industry love to celebrate agreements. They believe that signing trade deals is the hard part; that once the ink dries, opportunities flow naturally. At the national level, the language around India’s new FTAs with the EU, UK, US, Oman, and New Zealand is confident, even triumphant. Trade could approach $200 billion with Europe alone. Bilateral flows with the UK could cross $100 billion within a decade.
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But agreements do not operate in a vacuum. They depend on something less visible and far less discussed: the economic scaffolding that allows opportunity to be captured rather than merely announced. Odisha is standing beneath that scaffolding, close enough to see it, but not yet positioned to climb.
For decades, Odisha has done one thing exceptionally well. It has supplied the raw materials that powered India’s industrial rise. Roughly a quarter of India’s iron ore, a fifth of its aluminium capacity, and a significant share of its steel output come from this state. Ports like Paradeep quietly handle over 100 million tonnes of cargo each year.
Yet Odisha accounts for less than 1.5 per cent of India’s merchandise exports. The state produces, but does not proportionately participate in global trade.
What happened is that Odisha confused the product with the position. The product was raw material. The position of integrated, certified, value-added participation in global supply chains was never built. Raw materials move even when institutions are thin. Bulk commodities find buyers regardless of export infrastructure or compliance frameworks. But that era is closing.
The new FTAs are not designed for raw material economies. They reward value addition, environmental compliance, and integration into global supply chains. Engineering goods, speciality chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and EV components are the currencies of the agreements India has signed. States that built export readiness early will capture disproportionate gains. States that do not will experience adjustment pressures without commensurate rewards. Odisha risks the latter not because it lacks potential, but because its extractive growth model never required such scaffolding.
Consider what is now on the table. If Odisha captured just five per cent of the incremental engineering and metals exports to Europe, it could add $6 to 7 billion in exports over time, a figure that exceeds its entire current export base. With the UK, British assessments project tens of billions in trade gains driven by automobiles, textiles, and pharmaceuticals. Odisha employs more than half a million people in textiles, yet remains peripheral in the global apparel trade. Not because markets are closed, but because standards, branding, and export readiness were never treated as core infrastructure. Even New Zealand and Singapore, smaller in scale, offer compounding advantages through Paradeep’s existing shipping lanes and supply chains, gains that are quiet but durable.
Then there is the service sector, the quiet giant. Services already account for over 40% of India’s exports, and the new FTAs explicitly expand market access for IT and digital trade. Yet Odisha holds below 2% of India’s IT exports. It has talent that is serving Silicon Valley in Bangalore. What it lacks is positioning and government intent. In a services-driven trade world, invisibility is a choice.
The employment consequences compound this failure. Manufacturing and services exports generate far more jobs per dollar than mining. For a state grappling with migration and limited non-mining employment, the difference between exporting ore and exporting components is not merely economic. Exporting ore funds the state. Exporting components could transform it.
India’s FTAs have changed the external environment. The door is open. Whether Odisha walks through it depends entirely on whether it builds the internal scaffolding: standards committees, export facilitation desks, skills alignment programmes, and institutional coordination. Unglamorous work. But this is what durable trade success looks like.
In the global economy, opportunity is rarely denied outright. It is offered conditionally. Those who are prepared step forward. Those who are not remain suppliers to someone else’s success.
The writer is a Consultant at Grant Thornton Bharat in economic growth and investment promotion space
