How social protection can free India’s lost Einsteins

Unlocking India’s vast pool of denied genius begins with enabling conditions – a key prerequisite for innovation.

India’s ambition to become a global innovation hub is now part of the official vocabulary. Startup missions, incubators, venture capital flows and digital infrastructure dominate policy conversation. Yet beneath these initiatives lies a quieter but more decisive question: who in India can afford to take risks? Innovation is not simply a function of intelligence or ideas. It is a function of who can fail without falling into ruin. That is why the world’s most innovative nations are also the world’s most socially secure societies.

Conventional economic thinking treats social security as a burden on dynamism. Welfare, it is argued, dulls incentives and breeds dependence. Global evidence points in the opposite direction. Countries that rank highest on innovation indices are precisely those that protect citizens most comprehensively from the shocks of illness, unemployment, and income loss. Security does not suppress ambition. It equalises the opportunity to pursue it.

Innovation is inseparable from uncertainty. New enterprises collapse. Research fails. Technologies misfire. Where failure carries catastrophic personal cost, only the already privileged can afford experimentation. Where failure is a stepping-stone, risk-taking becomes socially enabling. This difference, between ruin and recovery, quietly determines how much of a nation’s intelligence can participate in innovation.

The Global Innovation Index published by the World Intellectual Property Organisation consistently places Switzerland at the top. Close behind are Sweden, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, with Nordic countries occupying much of the upper tier. These are not minimalist states. Switzerland combines high private enterprise with mandatory health insurance, unemployment protection, and strong social guarantees. The Nordic nations operate universal healthcare, income security, robust public schooling, and extensive retraining systems.

In Denmark’s well-known “flexicurity” model, retrenched workers receive subsistence protection and reskilling support to recover economic dynamism. Individuals have the right to fail without social annihilation. When the personal downside of risk is capped, the societal supply of risk-takers expands.

In the US, entrepreneurship rates rise sharply among those eligible for Medicare, suggesting that guaranteed healthcare directly enables business formation. Cross-national analyses across developed economies find that higher social protection spending correlates with higher patenting intensity and innovation output. People with stable access to healthcare, education, and income support display greater willingness to retrain, relocate, start new ventures, and invest in long-horizon ideas. Security expands the frontier of aspiration. Without security, risk-taking becomes a hereditary privilege which perpetuates social injustice.

India’s innovation challenge is often framed as inadequate capital, weak infrastructure or limited research spending. These matter. But a deeper structural constraint lies in how insecurity and inherited disadvantage shape life trajectories long before innovation becomes possible.

Caste-based occupations and entrenched poverty operate as social traps. Children born into deprived households frequently encounter limited nutrition, fragile schooling, stigma, and restricted networks. Their innate capabilities – intellectual, creative, and entrepreneurial – remain undiscovered or unsupported. The issue is not the absence of talent. It is the absence of enabling conditions.

Educational attrition magnifies this loss. When households lack income protection, illness or job loss forces children out of school. When quality schooling is uneven, talent identification becomes socially biased. Large numbers of children exit the learning pipeline before their abilities are even recognised. Innovation systems cannot thrive when potential inventors disappear before they reach visibility. This is not only an equity concern. It is a macroeconomic constraint that narrows the nation’s cognitive potential.

In 2017, economist Raj Chetty published research now known as the “Lost Einsteins” study. Examining patent records in the US, Chetty found stark disparities in inventor rates by race, gender, and income, with children from high-income families dramatically more likely to become inventors than equally capable children from low-income families. Crucially, measured ability was broadly similar across groups. Opportunity was not.

Chetty estimated that if children from low-income backgrounds, women, and minorities had the same opportunities as high-income white men, the total US innovation output would quadruple. The study’s central insight was simple: societies lose vast quantities of genius not because intelligence is scarce, but because opportunity is unevenly distributed.

Apply this lens to India. A country with deep social stratification, uneven schooling, and limited safety nets inevitably loses an even larger share of its potential inventors, designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs. These are India’s lost Einsteins.

Security as an equaliser

The promise of social protection is not merely poverty reduction. It is opportunity equalisation. Universal healthcare ensures illness does not dictate destiny. Income protection during unemployment allows families to maintain schooling continuity. Child nutrition safeguards cognitive development. Quality public education broadens talent discovery. Together, these measures distribute the ability to take risks more evenly across society.

Social protection should be seen as innovation infrastructure. Just as electricity and broadband extend market participation, security extends participation in risk-bearing activity. It enlarges the pool of people who can imagine, experiment, fail, and try again. A society that guarantees basic security to all unleashes a much larger imagination of what is possible. It converts denied skills into productive talent.

India’s innovation aspirations cannot be realised by startup policies alone. They require a foundational social compact: that citizens may pursue innovation without risking annihilation. India cannot continue losing millions of potential innovators to preventable insecurity.

The greatest resource India possesses is not its market size or demographic dividend. It is the intelligence, creativity, and enterprise currently locked behind social traps. Unlocking that potential demands recognising that security is not the cost of progress. It is its precondition.

The lost Einsteins are waiting. A renewed social security system can bring them into the open, and with them, a far larger imagination of what India can become.

(The writer holds a PhD in Public Policy from NLSIU and is a social scientist based in Australia, specialising in improving governance solutions for social and environmental challenges)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.