Discover how Bhubaneswar’s IRC Village transformed from a forest into a modern colony after hosting the 1982 Indian Roads Congress
Bhaskar Parichha
With the 84th Indian Roads Congress (IRC) being held in Bhubaneswar from November 6 to 10— inaugurated by Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari — the event has rekindled old memories. This marks the IRC’s return to Odisha after a decade. Over 3,500 delegates, including scientists, engineers, academics, and administrators from across the country, have gathered once again.
But few may know that the very name “IRC Village” — now one of Bhubaneswar’s most sought-after residential areas — owes its existence to this same congress.
Forest on the Edge of the City
Long before Bhubaneswar’s concrete veins reached this far west, the land that would become IRC Village lay wrapped in sal and teak — a quiet green lung on the edge of Nayapalli Mouza. Paddy shimmered in the low patches, tribal hamlets sent up kitchen smoke at dusk, and the only road was a red-dust track ending at CRP Square.
The forest belonged to birds, to the Revenue Department’s “poramboke” files, and to the slow rhythm of rural Odisha. A housing colony here was unthinkable.
Line That Changed Everything
Then, in March 1980, a single line in a Cabinet note changed everything: “43rd Indian Roads Congress to be hosted in Bhubaneswar, January 1982.”
The city then had barely 1,200 hotel rooms. Yet, 2,500 delegates were expected. Hotels could not be conjured in eighteen months. So the Works Department looked west — past the railway line, past the last row of government quarters — and saw the forest.
By April 1981, the trees were coming down: 1,800 of them, counted and felled under floodlights. Compensatory saplings were planted at Khandagiri, but here the laterite soil was stripped bare. Surveyors hammered nails into a perfect grid — six blocks, forty-foot roads, twenty-foot lanes. They named the blocks after rivers: Mahanadi, Brahmani, and Baitarani — because engineers, too, like poetry when they draw lines.
Race against Time
Construction began in the monsoon. Pre-cast RCC panels arrived on trucks from Roorkee; masons worked in gumboots, racing the calendar. In just five months, 248 quarters rose: 48 VIP suites with air-conditioner niches, 120 mid-tier homes, and 80 dormitory rooms for junior staff.
Water came from three new tube-wells and a pipeline from Khandagiri Reservoir. An 11 kV feeder was pulled from CRP Grid, and a hundred streetlights — Bhubaneswar’s first planned constellation — blinked on by December.
On January 6, 1982, Chief Minister J. B. Patnaik cut the ribbon at the N5 gate. Delegates poured in — 2,487 of them, from 28 states, 7 union territories, and a dozen foreign countries. For four days, the forest echoed with technical sessions, cultural evenings, and the clink of coffee cups in Mahanadi Block. By January 15, the last delegate had left, and the quarters fell silent.
From Temporary Camp to Permanent Colony
The plan was to demolish the site. But demolition would cost more than maintenance — and the engineers who had built the place had grown fond of it.
By 1983, the file moved again: “Convert into permanent residential colony for Class I & II officers.”
In 1985, the Bhubaneswar Development Authority took charge, christened it Indira Priyadarshini Residential Colony, and began allotting quarters. Sixty percent went to Works and Rural Development engineers, thirty percent to other departments, and ten percent to judges and IAS officers.
But the people still called it simply — IRC Village.
Becoming a Neighbourhood
Underground drainage arrived in 1987 — the first in western Bhubaneswar. A year later came the Indradhanu Market in N5 Block — sixty shops, a health centre, a community hall. Private plots were auctioned in 1991; the first hammer fell at ₹800 per square foot. By 1995, CRP Square had become a commercial whirlpool, and prices soared past ₹2,500.
The forest was gone, but the grid remained — now lined with gulmohar and bougainvillea.
The Modern Turn
The new century brought apartments. Suryamani, in 2003, was the first G+4; Aarna Enclave, in 2008, arrived with Italian marble and VRV air-conditioning. By 2020, property touched ₹5,000 per square foot.
Smart Janpath was widened to four lanes in 2015, and green cycle tracks appeared. CCTV cameras blinked at twelve junctions by 2019. The Urban Primary Health Centre in Indradhanu Market now treats over 150 patients a day — still keeping the original 1982 welcome board:
“43rd IRC Session – January 1982.”
Village that Refused to Vanish
Around 12,000 people live here now, in 2,800 households. Quarter A-12 in Mahanadi Block still bears its 1981 brass plate; its first resident, Er. P. K. Sahoo, Chief Engineer (Roads), stayed until 2018. The community hall in N5 has been renamed IRC Silver Jubilee Hall to mark the 84th Indian Roads Congress, forty-three years after a forest made way for a village.
The river names on the street signs — Mahanadi, Brahmani, Baitarani — have outlasted the rivers themselves. The Mahanadi is now a stormwater drain, the Baitarani a service lane. Yet every evening, when the LED streetlights come on in perfect synchrony, the grid remembers those five monsoon months of 1981 — the clang of pre-cast panels, the glow of floodlights, and the moment when a forest became a neighborhood that refused to vanish.
(The author is a senior journalist and columnist. Views expressed are personal.)
