India, June 17 -- Somewhere in a tier-three engineering college in Bihar, a final-year student is shelving a project that could have mattered. The prototype works. The methodology is sound. The faculty mentor has signed off. What it lacks is the one thing that turns a college project into a contribution: someone outside the campus who cares whether it succeeds. This is not an isolated story. India graduates over 15 lakh engineers every year, yet 67 percent of the country's published research emerges from just seven cities. The talent is dispersed; the infrastructure to develop it is not. We have built a system in which the geography of opportunity is far narrower than the geography of ability. The conventional diagnosis is that students lac...