In August, India became only the fourth country to successfully soft-land a spacecraft on the moon. Given the complexity of such missions, this was a mark of leading-edge expertise in science and technology that stands out more than building nuclear bombs, or innovation in software or biotech. This success was rightly lauded as a major signal of what India can accomplish under the right circumstances. In a completely different sphere, Neeraj Chopra is currently the Olympic and World champion in the javelin throw, an accomplishment that would have seemed unattainable for an Indian until recently.
The moon mission’s project director, P Veeramuthuvel, studied at regional engineering colleges before getting his doctorate from IIT Madras. Associate project director Kalpana Kalahasti was educated at IIT Kharagpur. By Indian standards, the IITs are intellectually elite institutions, but they are not considered to be global powerhouses like MIT or Cambridge University. Neither scientist came from an elite, or even upper middle-class background. Similarly, Neeraj Chopra was born and grew up in rural Haryana, and his formative years as an athlete were all spent in that state.
What these examples hint at is that India is capable of achieving world-class excellence with its domestic institutions and resources. In earlier cases of success, such as software, many of the high achievers had come to the US for graduate degrees, and rose within organisations that were already world-class. The exceptions were Infosys and a couple of other domestic IT firms, but they spent many years quite far from the leading edge of software development. In sports, the success of Indian cricketers was not truly world-beating, because so few countries play cricket at the highest level, though one should not forget the distance Indian cricket has travelled from when its team could not win abroad.
What is common in all these examples is that Indians without advantages of privileged birth circumstances were able to find institutional opportunities, for education and training and collaboration. These opportunities further required experienced individuals who could mentor or coach those with potential, and help them on the way to being world class, in whatever field they sought to excel. In some cases, there was also a matter of external circumstances providing opportunities for those who had reached a certain level. This was the case in software with the Y2K problem. In India, the problem is that the conditions for excellence are rarely present.
One can conceive of India’s shortfalls in three dimensions: breadth, depth and focus. By breadth I mean access to opportunity at all levels. Too many Indians still lack access to basic education and nutrition. This starts with preschool, but the lack of access continues through to every level—even with denial of access to quality education at early ages that reduces the numbers of those who might strive for higher education, even that reduced number is not well served. This is a problem of depth. There is always going to be a relatively small number of individuals who are pursuing cutting-edge science or competing in Olympics, but India mostly does not give these potential stars a chance to shine as brightly as they might. Finally, there is focus, the choice of arenas in which to excel. ISRO, with its space missions, has been a good example of successful focus.
Chess is also an example where, ever since the success of Vishwanathan Anand provided a role model, focused efforts have produced a slew of world-class players in the last few years. Interestingly, many of them still struggle for resources to reach a level where they can be self-sustaining: there are not the kind of institutional mechanisms that made the Soviet Union a chess powerhouse, creating mechanisms that continued to have an impact in many of its successor states.
In a different arena, China achieved Olympic success by picking a few sports in which to become world-class, and has steadily expanded that number of focused efforts. But even in 1984, China won more medals than independent India in its entire history.
Olympic sports, chess and moonshots may be good examples of arenas in which focus, discipline and expanding, at every stage of life, the pool of those who have a chance to excel, from maternal health to early childhood care to well-rounded education. None of these areas of potential world-class accomplishments necessarily require creativity or innovation.
But there may be a final dimension that will matter for the long run. Recent empirical work that incorporates methods for determining causality—and not just correlation—has found that there is a clear positive effect of academic freedom on innovation, as measured by the number of patent filings and patent citations. Worryingly, academic freedom has been falling in recent years, after increasing for six decades. The culprits include political control, ideological rigidity and corporatisation, so there is plenty of blame to go round.
So, there is a balance required, between the focus and commitment to provide the institutional structures for basic capabilities and traditional excellence, like a literal moonshot or chess or javelin throwing, but also freedom to explore and question and dream, for “moonshots” where the path is not well-defined, like new technologies or system designs for energy, food and habitations. Allowing minds to be free matters for these other “moonshots.”
The writer is Professor of economics, University of California, Santa Cruz