September 3, 2007: This site is to watch out for Orissa  — hence called orissawatch.org — with respect to the Human Resource Development; human resource being the most important resource of a state or a country. Here we will concern ourselves with HRD at all levels, starting with primary and K-12 education, to vocational education, higher education, and technical education. One of our focus is in "inclusive HRD development" across India as well as across Orissa. Thus we will track the progress in all aspects of HRD in Orissa as well as India. This site will also be like a database in that one can search and find historical articles about a particular HRD topic or institution. Thus one can chart the progress of an HRD project. Some good examples are charting what progress has happened to NISER, or AIIMS-like institute or Sri Sri University, etc.

If you like what we are doing, and would like to help us, please contact us. Currently the people that regularly contribute to this site are myself  and

For more more about me see my home page.)  We have also received pointers/comments/suggestions from Dr. Ratan Ghosh (IIT Kanpur),  Dr. Debendra Mohapatra (NCL, Pune)  and many others.

Following is a picture of me and Digambara taken in 2005, on a chilly but sunny morning in Tokyo.

But to read about the person who pushed to make this happen, we present a short history of this site:

I and Digambara with others have had many blogs in the blogger platform, mostly related to Orissa human resource development issues; some of them are:

Prashant Sahoo, a Orissa lover and Oriya lover with expertise in web development, had sites such as oriyamusic.com site. He contacted me with a great vision of a bunch of connected sites on Orissa and offered to help me in initial hosting and design. On a trial basis, this site on HRD was started, with the initial goal to cover higher education. Since then it has been broadened to go beyond higher education.

Although this site uses the wordpress platform and existing themes, Prashant babu did many customizations to that. These customizations take a lot of time, but it has been worth it, as it has improved the look and functionality of the site significantly. Prashant babu administered the site until July 29th 2007; during that period he also hosted this site for free at www.orissahosting.com and finally he did 99.99% of the work to move it to a new host. Until then he almost worked daily on improving various aspect of the site design. Our (the current team’s) sincere thanks and greatest appreciations to Prashant babu for all of that.