I grew up in the city. Power cuts lasted three hours on a bad day. Water came from a faucet. The electrician, plumber, carpenter, all came with a tap on my phone.
\nSo I studied hard during my years at Delhi Public School, did chemical engineering, and then an MBA from IIM Lucknow. Along the way, I did what ambitious students do: case competitions, client presentations, strategy projects. On the day of graduation, I felt ready. I felt prepared. I felt like I could walk into any room and solve any problem I was handed.
\nWhat I was not prepared for was Sundargarh.
\nIt was my first field visit as a Consultant at Samagra, a governance consulting firm I had joined after my MBA. The team had been advising the Odisha government on how to better utilise the District Mineral Foundation: a fund levied from mining companies intended to improve the quality of life of people living in mining-affected areas. The intention was good. The gap between intention and reality is what took me to a village in Sundargarh, on the edge of a mining zone, and changed something in me permanently.
\nIn the summers, when power cuts came, which came often and for long, families would pull their beds to sleep in the open sky for some relief from the humidity inside. The night air, carrying the particulate from a day's worth of mining activity, would settle into their lungs for eight hours. Every morning, people woke up and spat black. The ground shook when the blasting happened. Walls had developed long cracks. Windows had broken and not been replaced. I stood in that village and felt the weight of something I didn't have a word for then. I'd spent years preparing to solve problems. I had just never stood inside one before. Here's what I kept thinking on the drive back: every scheme that could have helped these people – housing, tap water, roads, irrigation, and nutrition support – existed. The government of India and the state of Odisha had built these programmes. Budgets had been allocated, and DMF funds were available with the state on top of that. The intent was there. I was reflecting on how in this century, a lot has been enabled. Quick commerce. Digital payments. Mobile connectivity reaching villages. The systems have got better at reaching people. Progress had a pulse. But the village in Sundargarh felt like it was far from that era to arrive. The dust on the roofs, the uncovered tank, and the cracked walls weren't signs of neglect so much as disconnection. The machinery of government schemes existed elsewhere, humming along, reaching crores of people. Here, it had simply not found a way in. Departments knew what they'd delivered. They had their numbers. But no one had real-time visibility into who was still excluded: which household in which village hadn't received what they were entitled to. There was no citizen-level gap list. No way for a district collector to see, in one place, the actual exclusion. That gap, not in the schemes themselves, but in the ability to see and close it is what an initiative was built upon. CM-SAMPADA: The Chief Minister's Saturation Approach for Mining-Affected People's Accelerated Development and Advancement, launched in December 2025, is the state's response to a straightforward but hard question: of all the people in all the mining-affected villages across Odisha, who is still excluded from the schemes they're entitled to, and how do we find them? Building it meant translating a policy intent into something a district official could actually use. But it was harder than it sounded. Every scheme had a different eligibility logic. Different departments owned different data. Some data did not exist in digital form at all. Some departments were reluctant to share. Some followed a different geographical cut. All this data had to be bound together with a unique identifier to enable visibility only for the fine-cut list of mining-affected villages. There were wireframes I had to design for district-level users who hadn't asked for a new tool. Vendor calls I had to navigate. UAT sessions where we'd catch usability failures only after someone in a district said I don't understand what this screen is telling me. Department sign-offs I had to chase, APIs I had to negotiate, and daily coordination I had to push to keep an 11-district rollout from slipping. None of this is what people mean when they say \"dashboard project\". What it actually was: a simultaneous exercise in policy translation, data governance, system design, stakeholder management, and field execution, which doesn't have a clean title. But I had my Samagra team and a direction. Today, 11 of the 20 targeted schemes are onboarded. District reviews have started. The first gap reports are being generated. A collector can now look at a village and see not a summary statistic but a list of households and which of them still don't have what they're entitled to. That's the output. That's what we built. But I keep going back to that village during my district visits. To the tank with no lid. To the dust on the rooftops. To the sound of blasting in the background as we spoke to families who had simply accepted this as what life was. They didn't know what a dashboard was. They didn't know their village was now a data point in a system that someone, somewhere, was watching. And maybe that's fine. Maybe that's how it should work: quietly, in the background, with the machinery of governance finally enabled to do what it was always supposed to do. What I know is this: somewhere in those 5100 villages is a family that is eligible for a tap water connection they haven't received yet. Somewhere in the gap list is a name. And if this works the way it's supposed to, if the right collector sees the right report in the right review, that family will stop walking to an uncovered tank in the dust. And when the child that has to breathe the dust of that village gets the kind of education I was privileged to get, the KPI I chase will become the whole point.The answer to an invisible gap: CM-SAMPADA
\nThe Light Beneath the Dust
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