Orissa Province in the context of "Odisha"

Provincial elections were held in British India in the winter of 1936–37 as mandated by the Government of India Act 1935. Elections were held in all gubernational eleven provinces - Madras, Central Provinces, Bihar, Orissa, United Provinces, Bombay, Assam, North-West Frontier Province, Bengal, Punjab and Sind. No elections were held in the British provinces of Delhi, Ajmer-Merwara, Coorg & Baluchistan and in the princely states.

The final results of the elections were declared on 20 February 1937. The Indian National Congress emerged in power in five of the provinces, Bombay, Madras, the Central Provinces, the United Provinces, the North-West Frontier Province, Bihar, and Orissa. The exceptions were Punjab, Sindh (where it failed to obtain majority), Assam & Bengal (where it was nevertheless the single-largest party). The All-India Muslim League failed to form the government in any province on its own.

Bihar and Orissa was a province of British India, which included the present-day Indian states of Bihar, Jharkhand, and parts of Odisha. The territories were conquered by the British in the 18th and 19th centuries, and were governed by the then Indian Civil Service of the Bengal Presidency, the largest administrative subdivision in British India.

On 22 March 1912, both Bihar and Orissa divisions were separated from the Bengal Presidency as Bihar and Orissa Province. On 1 April 1936, the province was partitioned into Bihar and the Orissa Province.

Odisha Day, also Utkal Dibasa, is celebrated on 1 April in the Indian state of Odisha in memory of the formation of the state as a separate state out of Bihar and Orissa Province with addition of undivided Koraput District and Ganjam District from the Madras Presidency on 1 April 1936.After losing its political identity completely in 1568 following the defeat and demise of the last king Mukunda Dev, efforts resulted in the formation of a politically separate state under British rule on a linguistic basis on 1 April 1936.

Parlakhemundi Estate was a Zamindari estate in the Orissa Province, India during the British era. Before the creation of the Orissa province, it was under the Madras Presidency. The state was ruled as an independent kingdom till 1769.The royal family belong to the Krishnatreya gotra Odia Kshatriya and traced their lineage to Eastern Ganga Dynasty. It was a zamindari estate lying in the southwestern portion of Ganjam district, covering an area of 615 square miles. It was bounded in the south by the district of Visakhapatnam and on the west by the Jeypore Estate and the tribal agencies of the Eastern Ghats.

The zamindars were a branch of the Eastern Ganga Dynasty that survived as the rulers of the Paralakhemundi estate, currently part of the Gajapati district, Odisha.

The Bengal famine of 1943 was a famine during World War II in the Bengal Province and Orissa Province of British India. An estimated 800,000–3.8 million people died, in the Bengal region (present-day Bangladesh and West Bengal), from starvation, malaria and other diseases aggravated by malnutrition, population displacement, unsanitary conditions, poor British wartime policies, and lack of health care. Millions were impoverished as the crisis overwhelmed large segments of the economy and catastrophically disrupted the social fabric. Eventually, families disintegrated; men sold their small farms and left home to look for work or to join the British Indian Army, and women and children became homeless migrants, often travelling to Calcutta or other large cities in search of organised relief.

Bengal's economy had been predominantly agrarian at that time, with between half and three-quarters of the rural poor subsisting in a "semi-starved condition". Stagnant agricultural productivity and a stable land base were unable to cope with a rapidly increasing population, resulting in both long-term decline in per capita availability of rice and growing numbers of the land-poor and landless labourers. A high proportion laboured beneath a chronic and spiralling cycle of debt that ended in debt bondage and the loss of their landholdings due to land grabbing.