Orissa has achieved significant progress in improving its social infrastructure.This is best reflected in the state's improving performance on the Human development Index, where it has risen to the eleventh rank in 2001. Human Development Index value has increased from 0.345 in 1991 to 0.404 in 2001.

Orissa has a strong network of educational institutions, which train a steady pool of qualified professionals for businesses and industries in the state.The state has 9 universities and over 700 institutions of higher education.These include 36 engineering colleges, 159 technical institutes, 47 colleges offering post graduate courses in computer applications, an agriculture university, 20 management institutes, 4 medical colleges (including a dental college), 3 nursing colleges and 14 pharmacy institutes.

Orissa's network of public and government-aided health facilities comprises 180 hospitals, 158 community health centres and 1,350 primary health centres, besides privately run hospital and healthcare centres.  

Access infrastructure

The total length of roads in Orissa is over 237,000 km. Orissa's road density of 168.6 km per 100 square km is higher than the national average of 76.8 km. The total length of national highways passing through the state is 3,704 km, this includes the highway connecting Kolkata and Chennai, a major transport corridor between east and south India . Under the on-going National Highway Development Programme (NHDP), 444 km of national highways in the state are being converted into 4-6 lane carriage-ways.The National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) has taken up 4-laning of NH-5 from Balasore to Icchapuram and NH-60 from Balasore to Laxmannath. Besides the up-gradation under the Golden Quadrilateral Project, the state government proposes to upgrade 1,505 km of existing state highways to national highways.The state government is also planning to develop a coastal highway along the coastline of Bay of Bengal linking Andhra Pradesh in south and West Bengal in north.The proposed coastline road length is to extend over 674 km from Gopalpur in Orissa to Midnapore in West Bengal and is envisaged to be executed with the assistance from Government of Norway. Within the state, Orissa plans to introduce an 80 km long mass rapid transit system (MRTS) to connect Cuttack and Bhubaneswar , the two biggest cities in the state.