India’s vision for Viksit Bharat@2047 hinges on empowering youth-driven think tanks that translate academic insight into actionable policy.
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This essay is part of the series “Five Years of NEP 2020: From Vision to Reality”
Alvin Toffler’s magnum opus, Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century, published in 1990, highlighted the ephemeral nature of power concentration that has been shifting from the traditional forms (based on force and money) to a new form based on knowledge. In the post-industrial society, knowledge has emerged as the dominant form of power, overtaking brute force and financial control. This ‘power shift’ has transformed the way humans perceive the world – politics, business, economy, culture, relationships, and global dynamics. The power of knowledge has become even more prominent due to its inextricable causal linkages with the progress of civilisations. While knowledge is not always fundamental, it has a bidirectional causal relation with ideas, innovation and more fundamentally, ingenuity, which—as defined by political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon—is the production of ideas applied to solve practical social and technical problems. Homer-Dixon further posits that technical ingenuity is a function of social ingenuity at the multilayered strata of humans’ social endeavours. Social ingenuity defines the capacity to craft innovative and adaptive solutions to societal challenges, often by reconfiguring human relationships and shaping new social frameworks. Therefore, it is key to the creation, reform, and maintenance of public and semi-public goods such as markets, funding agencies, educational and research organisations, and effective government. Ingenuity is recognised as a fifth factor of production, alongside land (natural capital), labour, capital, and entrepreneurship. This concept is similar to what neoclassical economics defines as total factor productivity. Viksit Bharat 2047, the vision of India attaining the status of a developed nation by its centennial year of independence, needs to be achieved through ingenuity. As a demographically young economy, India’s next great leap will necessitate social organisations to institutionalise new thinking in public policy and development governance. These require ingenuity or ideas that are practical and actionable in nature, grounded in evidence, emerging from a holistic systems approach, and embedded in a transdisciplinary framework. These ideas need to be incubated and nourished within institutions with an understanding of complexity and context. This is where the roles of think tanks emerge as ideational laboratories and brokers of applied knowledge. This justifies their growing relevance for actively preparing India’s youth to become architects of policy futures.
Social ingenuity defines the capacity to craft innovative and adaptive solutions to societal challenges, often by reconfiguring human relationships and shaping new social frameworks.
India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 envisions the development of a culture of research and innovation. It also attempts to bridge the gap between knowledge production and policy application by institutionalising the coveted National Research Foundation (NRF). Given this, think tanks must be reimagined not only as influencers of government policy, but also as incubators of human capital at the research-policy interface.
Think tanks are neither universities nor traditional social science research organisations (for example, those funded by the Indian Council of Social Science Research). Think tanks, operating at the intersection of research, policy, and public engagement, engage with a much broader ecosystem, such as policymakers, opinion makers, civil society, non-governmental institutions, and academia. Their existence in the social, economic, and ecological spectrum of human endeavours cannot be justified merely through publications in esoteric journals such as those in universities or traditional research organisations. While publishing in peer-reviewed platforms is only a necessary condition for justifying their existence, the think tankers need to communicate the core message of the published research to the broader ecosystem with which they are engaging. While addressing real-time problems in social, economic, political, and ecological domains, they also need to translate complex theoretical insights into actionable recommendations. Think tanks thrive on timeliness, relevance, and systems thinking, and can experiment, critique, and ideate, often going beyond the boundaries of the present to imagine possible futures. As knowledge creators within a transdisciplinary scaffold, they need to act as a bridge between the realm of knowledge and the sphere of decision-making. This role helps fill the gap often left by university departments or specialised research organisations that operate within disciplinary boundaries. Such compartmentalisation can hinder efforts to address complex problems effectively.
India’s demand for ‘ingenuity’ is not just technological but intellectual and institutional. Meeting these ‘ingenuity’ needs requires a generation of thinkers, researchers, and policy entrepreneurs who can move beyond disciplinary silos and conventional wisdom. The think tanks in India often have to act as finishing schools for young researchers (even those with Doctoral degrees) to channelise them to be thinkers of the next generation. This is also because the Doctoral programmes—whether in India or abroad—hardly teach their graduates to address complex problems using a holistic systems approach and a transdisciplinary framework. They also fall short in training scholars to develop practical, actionable solutions and to communicate policy problems and recommendations from their research on popular platforms within a limited span of time and space. While think tanks are increasingly playing the role of capacity builders in creating ‘ingenuity’, it is essential that their roles are acknowledged at the implementation levels of the NEP 2020, which has presented the broad vision for human capital development. This will require the following three steps.
The think tanks in India often have to act as finishing schools for young researchers (even those with Doctoral degrees) to channelise them to be thinkers of the next generation.
First, there needs to be systemic investments in creating a congenial institutional infrastructure that goes beyond the university system. The NRF’s mandate to fund high-quality research, develop capacity in universities, and promote evidence-informed policymaking can be properly fulfilled if think tanks are considered as collaborators. Some think tanks have already institutionalised structured youth engagement programmes in the form of:
Second, the skill sets needed by tomorrow’s ideational champions for addressing emerging developmental challenges are:
In such a scenario, the think tanks can emerge as grooming platforms for such capabilities and, in practice, probably better than universities due to their proximity to the policy coalface and a multidisciplinary approach.
Third, think tanks need to play a role in developing the right mindsets for ideation for the future among the motivated youth by cultivating curiosity, courage, and commitment. Public policy is as much about values and vision as it is about analysis. In addition to engaging with analytical tools, the youth should also be motivated to question the status quo, exposed to ethical dilemmas and public reasoning, encouraged to reflect critically and dissent, and commit to long-term thinking in the face of short-term pressures. This will help develop the future generations of thinkers, who are both intellectually rigorous and morally grounded.
Therefore, the relevance of Indian think tanks over time will depend not merely on their ability to influence policy through ideation but also on their ability to create a human capital base capable of that ideation. Toward this end, the following ideas are proposed:
These initiatives are not only in alignment with the NEP but further its call for research-driven education and NRF’s emphasis on building institutional capacity for applied research.
Think tanks can be the enablers of this transformation, not just as advisers to the state and incubators of ideas, but as mentors to the next generation of knowledge creators, and as cultivators of a culture where evidence, ethics, and innovation go hand in hand.
In this moment of immense possibilities, India’s ambition of Viksit Bharat@2047 should not be treated as merely a function of physical infrastructure, but of intellectual infrastructure that will act as the fountainhead of future policy ideation. Think tanks can be the enablers of this transformation, not just as advisers to the state and incubators of ideas, but as mentors to the next generation of knowledge creators, and as cultivators of a culture where evidence, ethics, and innovation go hand in hand. Perhaps over the next 22 years, the relevance of the think tank may not be measured only by the numbers of published policy papers, or frequency of media citations, or in terms of the ‘ingenuity’ it brings in the public domain, but also by the number of young minds it inspires, trains, and launches into the world of public policy research and ideation.
Nilanjan Ghosh is Vice President - Development Studies at the Observer Research Foundation.
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Dr Nilanjan Ghosh heads Development Studies at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) and serves as the operational and executive head of ORF’s Kolkata Centre. He ...
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