Curiosity and its role in India’s growth story

Authored by - Vikram Janakiraman, managing director & senior partner, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) India, & a leading expert in the Industrial Goods Practice.

As India pushes toward its Viksit Bharat @ 2047 goal of becoming a $30-trillion economy, one resource remains alarmingly underdeveloped — curiosity. Achieving that ambition will require more than cost advantages in manufacturing and services; it will demand innovation— and innovation begins with curiosity.

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Helping my children study reignited my curiosity about curiosity itself — and how early many of us lose it. India’s education system, though richer in content than before, still stifles inquiry. This isn’t a minor flaw: Curiosity powers innovation, and innovation powers nations. As automation and global fragmentation reshape economies, India cannot rely on low-cost advantages alone. We must nurture problem-solvers who ask “why,” not just follow SOPs.

Fixing this will take patience, better schools, industry participation, and — to ensure it doesn’t deepen inequity — greater respect and value for skilled work. Rekindling curiosity in classrooms today may well define our competitiveness tomorrow. Over the last couple of years, I have spent time helping my children study for their XIIth and IXth science curriculum. The experience, while enjoyable, sparked some insights for me as well. Firstly, both the NCERT and ICSE books are very well written. Since the time I was a student some decades ago, the books have become richer in real-life, relatable examples that help children grasp a concept before delving into theory or math. As a result, the text, for the most part, doesn’t feel abstruse or boring.

Secondly, children are inherently inquisitive. This capability only needs to be nurtured. My 14-year-old has probably never heard of the “5 why” framework, but he certainly applies it.

His third or fourth question when we were discussing basic electricity was : “Where does the negative charge on an electron come from?” While I vaguely recalled it had something to do with convention and quantum theory, I had to shamefacedly admit I didn’t know. He was deeply dissatisfied with that answer.

Thirdly, teachers — for reasons I can’t fully fathom — are unable or unwilling to nurture this inquisitiveness. Maybe it is the teacher-to-student ratio that is low to keep education affordable, the unattractiveness of teacher salaries, or simply that teachers themselves are products of the same “curiosity-killing” pedagogy they now perpetuate. My experiences are admittedly tier-1 and metro-skewed, while the majority of our students live in smaller cities and rural areas where infrastructure is far weaker. This is a failing of our education system that is perhaps most egregious and in need of an urgent fix. Nurturing curiosity, rewarding skills.

Lose curiosity young, and the spark rarely returns. The habit of asking “why”—why something works, or why it doesn’t—is like a muscle. Stretch it daily, and it grows strong. Leave it idle, and it withers, until even the simplest “why” feels too heavy to lift. Of course, there are exceptions: we all know bright, inquisitive people who thrived despite the system.

But step into most classrooms and you’ll see the opposite. Older students rarely raise their hands to ask “why.” Fresh graduates from our best universities often struggle when a problem demands more than memorised answers. The pattern is clear: The longer curiosity goes untended, the more it fades. A fix is also vital for India’s prosperity. So far, our focus has been on growing both services and manufacturing; the Make-in-India initiative, for instance, continues to try and bring more manufacturing enterprises to the country. In my work across manufacturing and services, I’ve often observed how employees follow established SOPs yet rarely question or improve them. Part of this stems from a culture that prizes compliance over creativity — a mindset I once shared myself, having worked in a regulated industry where adherence ensured quality and reliability. The unintended result was that improvements depended on senior leaders who had little time for hands-on innovation. Over time, I’ve come to see the value of giving employees a structured outlet for thinking and problem-solving. When organisations succeed in doing so, the rewards are striking — higher productivity, better yields and safer, more sustainable operations.

However, if the reader will pardon a generalisation, I have found it incredibly tough to bring thinking back into the equation. The issue, I realise, is often a systemic lack of curiosity and problem-solving skills. Strengthening these skills can make our firms more efficient, competitive at home and abroad, and support India’s growth.

Till earlier this decade, we lived in a world that was committed to being more multilateral and globalised than ever before. But this is fast changing. The reasons are many and not the subject of this note. Yet the resultant tariff and non-tariff barriers being thrown up by each country have already affected trade in goods and might affect services too. Factor-cost advantages that once drove globalisation have also proven fleeting — look no further than China’s rapid wage inflation over the last two decades. India can no longer rely on low-cost manufacturing and services to continue fuelling economic growth in the medium to long term. So, what can help us overcome these barriers? In one word – innovation. The road to a country going from developing to developed-nation status is paved with innovation. If the earlier geopolitical order had persisted; we might have had decades to get there. But with the recent global upheavals, we must move faster — fostering genuine innovation in science, technology, and application.

But this requires a workforce with deeper curiosity and a different level of problem-solving.

We often point with pride to the Indian diaspora that contributes to IP generation in the US and Europe, and assume we simply need to provide “the right conditions” for nurturing curiosity, rewarding skills outcomes at home. But many more of our graduates remain in India, and too few are truly innovative. Given the diversity of firms they join, the issue lies not in their employers but in their skills and training.

The context we live in makes fixing this capability more difficult.

We are living in the age of “search” and “solve” at the touch of a button; this is already having an accelerating effect on how fast curiosity and problem-solving capabilities atrophy A few decades ago, as a student, any “why” needed a discussion with a guide, reference books, interpretations and applying the learnings to the problem at hand — all of which exercised the inquisitiveness muscle. Today, a quick search provides the exact solution. The student reads and “understands” it, but the ability to apply that knowledge to a new question rarely lasts. And with the advent of LLMs, now some of the reasoning can also be outsourced, and LLM capabilities and accuracy are rising rapidly. If the uncontrolled and unsupervised use of LLMs, especially by children, runs unchecked, each succeeding generation may lose more of their problem-solving skills and curiosity too, becoming ever more dependent on “search and solve”. This is not to suggest we eschew the use of such tools entirely, but thoughtfully integrate them into the fabric of learning – by means of controlled experiments that limits the risk of them taking over thinking entirely for children at a time in their learning journey when they need to build their own reasoning and inquisitive skills.

The importance of rekindling curiosity in our children should, by now, be clear. But achieving it will demand sustained effort and patience. Our primary and secondary schools must improve teacher quality, pay, and pedagogy. They should collaborate with educational institutions that have “cracked the code” of inspiring first-principles thinking and learning by experimentation. And this must happen at affordable costs for the common man, not just in expensive IB schools. To ensure this, companies can potentially play a pivotal role—by adopting schools, funding facilities, helping pay attractive salaries to returning members of the Indian diaspora and to teachers in general, and sponsoring educationists to guide curriculums that foster curiosity and application. The government can support this by providing tax advantages or CSR funding status for such educational spending. High-school students could be required to intern with companies and local city/district administrations to solve small, real-life problems. Competitions at city, state, and national levels can make learning exciting and strengthen problem-solving. These efforts will not be a silver bullet but will gradually raise the average level of inquiry in our students—and produce a steady stream of true problem-solvers.

As this talent pool grows, universities will need to evolve their admission criteria to value curiosity and creative thinking, not just marks. Retaining such talent will become easier as global barriers rise and opportunities in India expand. If we stay the course, we could see visible impact within 10–15 years, and transformational change within a generation or two — fuelling innovation across our institutions and industries.

The fix will, alas, not be equitable in the short term; we need to balance it with respect for the skilled worker. We must be realistic. Broad-based change across all regions of India will take much more time. In the short term, thus, the investment and return will not be equitable across society.

For the nation, success will come from being selective and deliberate instead of spreading ourselves too thin. While equity in educational outcomes is a longer-term goal, in the short-term we need to strive for equitable opportunities in society. And for that, we must also promote, dignify, and make vocational skills attractive as a career choice.

In India, skilled trades still lack the social respect they enjoy in developed countries. A degree is not the only path to a dignified life—factory workers, plumbers, electricians, and carpenters elsewhere live well and are valued. Here, such vocations often depend on low-paid apprenticeships and face barriers to self-employment. Labour remains undervalued, unintegrated with society at large and seen as beneath those fortunate enough to be educated graduates. As a result, young people see degrees—and often underpowered degrees—as their only escape, even when job opportunities are scarce. The resultant is growing ranks of undereducated and underemployed, disenchanted people. The government’s renewed focus on skilling is a timely lever—but its success will depend on three simple things: Raising apprenticeship stipends, making credentials truly portable, and signalling parity of esteem and growth-opportunities with degrees.

To make progress equitable, India must reform how it educates, trains, and values its workforce—whether they hold degrees or tools. True innovation demands both thinkers and doers. Only when curiosity meets craftsmanship will we see the kind of prosperity that lasts generations.

Bringing curiosity back into our children is vital if India is to reclaim its place as an innovation-driven economy in the decades ahead. Since we cannot achieve this overnight, we must also restore respect for skilled workers, ensuring they earn a dignified living, have opportunities to grow, and are valued members of society. Achieving this will demand concerted effort across industry, academia, government, and the wider community.

This article is authored by Vikram Janakiraman, managing director and senior partner, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) India, and a leading expert in the Industrial Goods Practice.