Having read the book in its entirety, I have some concerns about the scholarship and intent of the author which cause me to dismiss his hypothesis with regards to the birthplace of Siddhattha Gotama or at least hold it in less regard than the academically accepted one.

There are few things about this that immediately raise red flags. First, the publisher is neither an academic publisher, nor university publisher, nor a national publisher, but rather what seems to be an independent bookseller in Cuttack, Odisha. This isn't necessarily a mark against the book, but it does seem rather odd and makes me a little concerned. In the defense of the publisher, they do seem to focus mainly on Odian history, but I've been unable to find any other publications by them outside of a small list of titles, which seemed to be a literature review of Odisha and a book of local inscriptions.

Secondly, the author has no listed academic training. His biography lists that he worked in administration and oversaw some archeological sites, but without historiographical training of some sort, I question his ability to properly contextualize findings. Another key point that concerns me is the odd emphasis placed on the author's ties to Odisha and his dedication to someone who is apparently the "Supreme Authority of the Kalinga Kingdom," as well as other statements bearing a slight heir of Odian nationalism. It calls to mind a similar work I read a while ago claiming that the Buddha was really Sinhalese, which is demonstrably false.

Of course, none of this gets into the content of the book. His first mistake, I think, is how he has interpreted the inscription in Kalipeswara and the nearby temple is problematic. He dismisses concerns about the oddites of the pillar he asserts as a repurposed Ashokan pillar without a good argument. Furthermore, there are some strange features of the inscription itself which make me question its authenticity. Notably, it is near identical to the pillar at Lumbini but is missing letters and words, as though coppied with mistakes. The hand it is written in is also less skilled than the one at Lumbini and the inscription is rougher overall. Furthermore, the inscription bears a mark of an inscriber, which, to my knowledge, no Ashokan pillar has. The Insciber's name is in Karosthi rather than Brahmi as the rest of the inscription. The use of Karosthi this far east would be odd for an Ashokan inscription, although I believe that some Satavahana and Shunga stupas and carvings bear the script indicatimg foriegn carvers, especially at Sanci. I lack a full picture of the site and inscrption and can find NO other scholarship on it, so I am not confident in providing a guess at its full context, but inauthentic would be in the front of my mind.

The second major issue is how freely the author mixes accepted fact and legend about Ashoka's life. His scholarship ventures away from the scholarship on Ashoka and into local and Buddhist legend, which appear to be, at best, problematic. This is not a terrible thing, but much of his explanation relies upon it. He does the same with the Buddha (notably refering to his father as ruling a large kingdom when even at the time of the monograph's composition it was thought to be a small tribal republic.)

Furthermore, it goes against ehat we have established of Indian political geography of the era. The Sakya clan is said to have bordered Kosala, and have been closr to the Mallas, which would be impossible if it were locates that far Southeast.

His final proofs are similarly weak, such as asserting that cousin marriage was only practiced in Kalinga (while unusual in orthodox Brahminical and Indo-Aryan society, plenty of India and Nepal in the sixth century were neither) or the odd genologies he uses. I'm actually less convinced after his proofs than before, given the issues with them.

--I'm actually perhaps most struck by how little I can find beyond this. There are no rebuttals, no supports, or anything else on the scholarly web, only a few blog posts and Odian and Indian nationalist blogs using this monograph as their only support. I would think I'd find something, but this seems to be it. I may be the only academic to talk about this in decades.-- EDIT: I'm not, here's a more comprehensive response

In all honesty, I am going to call this a weak theory at best. I don't think there was any nationalist or sinister agenda behind this work, it was just a man very proud of his heritage with a pet theory and an interesting artefact. In my opinion, our best candidate for the Buddha's birthplace remains Lumbini, and all of the archeology done there supports that. If some locals want to believe that their village is the real birthplace though, that's fine I think. Hundreds, no thousands, of villages throughout history have a legend of how the Buddha did something there or his ancestors were from there, noatter how improbable that is, and I see no reason to dismiss that. However, from a historical perspective, maybe not so much.