Of the denim fabric maker’s 2,200 workers, spread across six plants, more than 1,700 are from the eastern states of Odisha, Bihar, West Bengal and Assam.
The 52-year-old native of West Bengal has been in the human resources role for 13 years. He claims he can now understand the mindset of migrants really well. Those from Odisha are the most efficient, he vouches. “Most migrants work hard, but what sets workers from Odisha apart is their skills. They are well trained,” he said.
The company, he explained, has benchmarks to evaluate all workers. For instance, those working in the ring spinning section—where yarn is produced from fibre such as cotton, wool and viscose—are considered medium level workers if the output they achieve is 85% of the benchmark. Those who exceed 93% are considered highly skilled.
“Workers from Odisha consistently exceed the 93% level. By doing so, they end up earning a significant portion of the production incentive on offer,” he added.
Many workers from the state also move up the ladder faster, quickly becoming trainers and supervisors. Their wage premium (the wage differential between skilled Odisha workers versus workers from other states) at Sri Kannapiran Mills is as high as 20 to 30%.
The story in nearby Tiruppur, India’s knitwear capital, is similar. “Workers from Odisha earn higher than other workers as their productivity is high,” said Raja M. Shanmugham, founder of Warsaw International, a large exporter of knitwear and former president of Tiruppur Exporters’ Association.
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Workers from the state have impressed industries beyond textiles. “They are good and what sets them apart is their can-do attitude. It helps them punch higher than their weight compared to other workers,” said Masood Hussainy, executive director, Tata Advanced Systems, an aerospace manufacturing and defence technology company headquartered in Hyderabad.
The company recruits consistently from the Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) in Odisha. ITIs, first set up under a scheme in 1950, offers vocational training in various trades, from carpentry to welding.
Usha Ramanathan, head of human resources at Chennai-based Johnson Lifts, has also been recruiting students from the state’s ITIs. Last year, she recruited 54. The company has helped shape a lift and escalator mechanic course at ITI-Berhampur.
“We hire students from this course even before their final results are declared,” she said.
The template
What makes workers from Odisha special?
The answer lies in the state’s vocational skilling programme, called ‘Skilled in Odisha’. The initiative, started in 2016, has set new standards for vocational skill training. The wage premium that Odisha workers seem to enjoy across sectors is just one element of its success. A second element is placements. The average placement in government-run ITIs in the state was around 50% last year. In some of the best-performing ones, placements touched 80%.
Third, enrolments at the ITIs have risen sharply. According to government data, student vacancy levels have dropped from 40% levels in 2016 to just 1% last year. More importantly, the enrolment of girls has jumped from just 3% to 33%.
“Odisha, traditionally a labour supply state, was the first to identify people as a resource and invest heavily into skilling,” Anita Rajan, former CEO of Tata Strive, a skill development body under the aegis of the Tata Trusts, said.
“No other state in India celebrates vocational education like Odisha. I am glad that even after a government change, its importance has been retained,” Chong Fook Yen, principal social sector specialist at Asian Development Bank (ADB), said. Earlier, he managed the organization’s vocational training projects in India.
The Biju Janata Dal, which ruled Odisha since 1997, lost to the Bharatiya Janata Party during assembly elections held in 2024.
“Skilled in Odisha is an idea that is firmly entrenched,” said Subroto Bagchi, co-founder of Mindtree, an IT firm that was acquired by Larsen and Toubro Ltd (L&T) in 2019. He was the first chairman of the Odisha Skill Development Authority.
Invited by former chief minister Naveen Patnaik in 2016 to help shape the state’s skilling architecture (he took home a token salary of ₹1 per year), Bagchi put in place the building blocks that have led to the success we see today.
Is it time for other states to replicate Odisha’s skilling initiative? “Odisha is a template. What works for Odisha will work for others too,” said Bagchi.
A nano story
Things were very different when Rajat Kumar Panigrahi joined ITI Berhampur as principal in 2007.
“Government-run ITIs in the state were in a state of decay. Students hated studying in an ITI. Only those who were academically poor and had no other options left enrolled,” recalled Panigrahi.
The curriculum was not aligned to the needs of the industry and the skill gap was huge.
Tata Motors, in 2009, recruited 115 students from the ITI for a Nano production line at its Rudrapur facility in Uttarakhand. A year later, only 20 of them remained, Panigrahi recalled. When he enquired, the reason surprised him. Workers in automobile production lines have to stand for eight hours but students from the ITI never experienced this before—they were taught in a classroom, where they mostly sat. Also, eight hours of work at a production line requires a certain level of stamina and health.
Skill gap apart, the bigger challenge was that vocational education was not seen as aspirational. “Studying or teaching in an ITI was not seen as a badge of honour,” he added. This stemmed from the fact that society does not respect vocational professions such as plumbers, electricians and truck drivers in the same manner as an entry-level information technology engineer. “Why take up training for a job which does not get respect?” Panigrahi asked.
Also, as many as 1.1 million students who had dropped out of school in the state had no clear pathway for reasonable employment.
The charter
At that point, the predominantly agrarian state was not creating enough jobs. Agriculture was undependable and industrialization was low except for some big companies in the minerals and metal sectors.
Though the Odisha government was open to allowing its workers to migrate to other states in search of livelihood, a lack of skills meant poor opportunities and pay. To make workers employable, they needed to be skilled.
Odisha Skill Development Authority was set up in 2016 with Subroto Bagchi at the helm. He was given a free hand and a one-line charter—make ‘Skilled in Odisha’ an aspirational brand.
Bagchi drew up a multi-pronged approach. It involved fixing the ITIs, scaling up the short-term training programmes targeted at youth who had dropped out of school, and setting up a facility that will act as a finishing school to make ITI graduates learn soft skills and become more employable.
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Design thinking
One of the first steps taken was to make ITIs aspirational. “To do that, we began to look for role models within the ITIs. Every principal was asked to identify students who had passed out of their ITI before and were doing exemplary work. Their story was presented to the students as role models,” said Panigrahi.
Their success stories transformed the way students viewed ITIs. To build self-confidence, which was low, the government roped in the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) to design uniforms. The students were also introduced to sports and arts (acting and debating). These steps ensured they attended class—they had cool things to do apart from simply learning trades.
A concept of ‘change agent’ was introduced with the help of organizations such as Tata Strive. Change agents were people who taught the students soft skills such as teamwork, leadership, problem solving, sustainability and design thinking.
“This significantly supplemented the technical skills they learnt,” said Tata Strive’s Rajan. But the initial days were tough. “At the beginning, the principals and teachers looked down on the change agents. For them, technical skills were a lot more important than life skills, but over time, when they saw how the life skills were changing students, they fell in line,” she added.
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Transmission queen
Soft skills considerably enhanced employability. So did a focus on ‘practical’ skills—the sit and learn model was passé.
29-year-old Sita Behera is a ‘grade-1’ technician at the Odisha Power Transmission Corporation Ltd (OPTCL), a power transmission company. She earns ₹5 lakh annually.
A native of Soran village in Khordha district of Odisha, located on the banks of Chilika lake, the largest brackish water lagoon in Asia, she joined ITI Berhampur and pursued a course to become an electrician. After being shortlisted by OPTCL, she was asked to climb a 40-foot tower—a requirement to bag the job. Not many expected her to succeed, but she did.
“At the ITI, we were taught to climb electric poles and towers,” Behera said.
Her success has earned her a moniker: the ‘transmission queen of Odisha’.
Maximalist approach
Then, as many as 215 ITI teachers were sent to the Institute of Technical Education (ITE) Singapore, considered as one of the best skilling institutions in the world, for training. This created a sense of purpose among the teachers and lifted their morale. The ITI curriculum was also realigned to the needs of the industry. Many ITIs tied up with companies to set up Centre of Excellences and design specific courses.
The short-term employment-linked skilling programmes were scaled up with as many as 80 partners. “Apart from teaching traditional skills such as sewing machine operations or teaching hospitality, new age skills in sectors such as electronics, retail, electric vehicles and green energy were introduced,” said Bhupendra Singh Poonia, commissioner cum secretary, Skill Development and Technical Education. This helped those who had dropped out of school.
In March 2021, the state unveiled an 18-storey World Skill Center at Bhubaneswar, built at the cost of ₹1,272 crore, and funded by ADB. It is a unique finishing school with modern laboratories and a curriculum designed by ITEES, the education consulting arm of ITE Singapore.
“As of today, 5,000 students have been trained here. Campus placement is in excess of 90% and average annual package is ₹3.8 lakh,” Poonia said. Plans are afoot to launch phase-2 of the World Skill Center. “In the next five years, we will have at least two World Skill Centers outside of Bhubaneswar,” he added.
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The fuel
The Odisha government, emboldened by its skilling success, is thinking big when it comes to industrializing the state. At the recently concluded ‘Utkarsh Odisha: Make in Odisha Conclave 2025’, it wooed investors aggressively.
“Odisha will be the growth engine of Viksit Bharat,” the state’s chief minister, Mohan Charan Majhi, told Mint during an interaction on the sidelines of the conclave held end-January. And Odisha’s growth, he added, will be powered by its skilled workforce.
The investors responded well. They committed investments worth ₹16.73 trillion at the conclave—involving 593 projects in 30 districts.
“Much of the investments that Odisha received earlier were metals and mineral focused. This year, investors have shown interest in engineering, IT and ITES, chemicals, petrochemicals, textiles, ceramics, pharma and many more,” said Sampad Chandra Swain, the state’s industry minister. “Odisha’s large pool of skilled workers is clearly a differentiating factor,” he added.
Alarm bells
In February 2024, Naveen Patnaik laid the foundation for Welspun group’s Integrated Textile Manufacturing Facility near Bhubaneswar. It was being set up with an investment of ₹3,000 crore. The state is now eyeing ₹10,000 crore worth of textile investments over the next five years; it could create 100,000 jobs.
These moves have set alarm bells ringing in the traditional textile clusters of Coimbatore and Tiruppur. “If workers from Odisha choose to return to their state, we will be in crisis,” said Tiruppur’s Shanmugham.
Sri Kannapiran Mill’s Ram Babu Singh is equally worried. These days, he is busy trying to resettle migrant workers in Coimbatore. The mill is offering incentives such as housing, family health insurance and education for children—a pre-emptive effort to make migrant workers stay back permanently.
So far, he has managed to resettle over 300 families, including 15 from Odisha. But he is racing against time, he admitted. Odisha’s skilling success is shaping a new competitive federalism.
