As India sets its sights on becoming a developed nation by 2047, the centenary of its Independence, the debate is dominated by gleaming metros, semiconductor plants and trillion-dollar economic milestones. A quieter story is unfolding far from the skyline. A nationwide analysis of government data from Mission Antyodaya has found that nearly 28,000 of India’s 641,000 villages stand empty, without a single resident.

These ‘ghost villages’ are more than a statistical curiosity. They are locked homes, fallow fields and silent village squares and they warn us that a developed India cannot be built if rural India, its foundation, is slowly walking away. The geography of desertion is strikingly uneven. The number of empty villages ranges from just one in Kerala to 5,506 in Uttar Pradesh. Bihar follows with 3,431, Odisha with 3,303, Maharashtra with 2,413, Karnataka with 1,723 and Assam with 1,703. At the other end of the scale, Ladakh, Lakshadweep, Mizoram, Delhi and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands report none at all. Kerala’s near-zero figure is instructive.

Where roads, schools, hospitals and local livelihoods reach the doorstep, villages hold their people. Where they do not, people leave. The study, led by researchers at the National Institute of Urban Affairs, found that more than half of the empty villages lie at least ten kilometres from the nearest road, public transport link, senior secondary school, bank, market, primary health centre and hospital. Popular wisdom holds that ghost villages are mostly a feature of hilly states such as Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. The data shows otherwise : many lie outside mountainous regions, in the plains and plateaus of the country’s heartland.

The clustering in states with high rates of out-migration suggests that abandonment is driven less by geography than by neglect. For Odisha, the figure of 3,303 empty villages should be a matter of serious reflection. It places the state third in the country,........

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