New Delhi, April 15 -- Vikram Sarabhai, when pressed on why a poor country should spend on space research, offered an elegant rebuttal. He said that we are not in competition with economically advanced nations. We are endeavouring to apply the most advanced technologies to the real problems of humankind.

He died in 1971, the year India ran an enormous fiscal deficit to finance the Bangladesh war. The two are unconnected. But the question his interlocutors were really asking was: Can a fiscally stretched economy afford to innovate? It turns out to be the wrong question. The right one runs the other way.

A paper published this year in Oxford Economic Papers by Can Sever of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) titled 'Government Debt and ...