He opted for voluntary retirement, nine years before completion of his service and joined Biju Janata Dal in the presence of party president and CM Naveen Patnaik on 29 August 2018.

[1] Since 28 June 2019, he is the member of the Parliament of India representing Odisha in the Rajya Sabha[2] and general secretary of the BJD Parliamentary Party office, the upper house.

His thesis was published as a book by Palgrave Macmillan titled Institutional Change and Power Asymmetries in the context of Rural India in 2016.

He had also conducted audits of electricity distribution companies and brought to notice issues in revenue collection during the Odisha Olympic Association.

[9] His report brought to notice several shortcomings of the state government such as laxity in pulling in more traders within the tax net, wrong self-assessment by businesses, purchase suppression, sales suppression, and misclassification of commodities, application of incorrect rate of tax, part of turnover escaping assessment, and incorrect exemption.

[10] In Sikkim, he conducted the first-ever public audit of hydropower projects being developed then under a PPP arrangement.

[11] In addition to detailed financial audits and value-for-money evaluations of Central and State government programs in sectors like health service delivery, water supply, consumer protection, poverty reduction, public-private partnership models, and issues relating to environmental protection and climate change, he has also conducted international audits of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations at Rome and in Kabul and of the United Nations Peacekeeping Operations in Darfur and Entebbe.

He also completed a performance audit of the UN's spending on information and communication technology services across peacekeeping operations around the globe in October – November 2014 at the UN Headquarters in New York.

[15] Patnaik was also an early voice in the parliament on the threat of covid before the imposition of the national lockdown in India.

He has worked with slum children and in fabricating very unique e-auto ambulances to mitigate physical access issues for families located in interiors of Sundargarh District to the nearest health centres.

He developed a power-asymmetry-based framework in his book based on his doctoral research “Institutional Change & Power Asymmetry in the Context of Rural India” in which he argued that a champion with the right attributes and the 'ability’ to 'convene' people over a social issue can succeed if only he/she can resolve or reduce the deep-rooted societal power asymmetries within that community.