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Ask most people to name a global superpower and they'll reach for the obvious: military muscle, Olympic medal tallies, football rankings, the roar of a stadium crowd. By those measures, India — a country of 1.4 billion people, the world's most populous nation, and the fifth-largest economy — looks curiously modest. At the Paris Olympics, India's all-time medal count stands at just 41.¹ Its FIFA ranking sits at 138th in the world, wedged somewhere between Mozambique and Antigua. In the multi-sport theater that the world tends to use as a shorthand for national greatness, India is conspicuously absent from the top table.
And yet, to leave the story there would be to badly misread one of the most consequential countries on the planet. Because India is, in a very real sense, a superpower — just not the kind the scoreboard measures. Its influence travels not through relay batons or penalty kicks, but through patents, algorithms, Nobel lectures, and the quiet dominance of Indian-origin talent at the highest levels of global science, technology, and business. Understanding why that is, tells us something important — not just about India, but about how power actually works in the modern world.
The Numbers Behind the Narrative
Start with patents, the unglamorous but revealing currency of innovation. In the financial year 2024–25, India recorded 110,375 patent applications, with domestic filings accounting for nearly 62 percent of the total — a striking sign of homegrown innovation rather than foreign companies simply registering ideas on Indian soil.² By FY2026, filings had crossed 140,000, a trajectory that reflects sustained, structural growth rather than a one-off spike.³
Multinationals have noticed. Reuters recently reported that global technology companies are increasingly using India's tech hubs not just as service centers, but as genuine engines of intellectual property creation — generating patents, trade secrets, and proprietary innovation at scale.⁴ India's English-speaking engineering talent base, combined with world-class institutions like the IITs and IISc, has made it one of the most productive knowledge factories on earth. When the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Adobe are all of Indian origin, that is not a coincidence. It is a pipeline.⁵
The academic record reinforces this. Indian-origin scholars and researchers have left their mark across economics, physics, chemistry, literature, and peace — fields recognized by the Nobel committee, the most prestigious intellectual scoreboard humanity has devised.⁶ India's reach in ideas is global, deep, and growing.
So Why the Sporting Gap?
The honest answer is structural, not cultural. Sporting dominance at the international level — real, broad-based dominance across multiple disciplines — requires decades of coordinated investment: grassroots school programs, coaching academies, world-class facilities, and competitive pathways that funnel talent upward from millions of children to a handful of elite athletes. Countries that punch above their weight in sport, whether Jamaica in sprinting, Kenya in distance running, or the Netherlands in cycling, have usually built those ecosystems deliberately and patiently over generations.
India has not done that uniformly. What it has done, for most of its post-independence sporting history, is concentrate. Cricket absorbed the lion's share of money, media attention, cultural passion, and institutional investment. Everything else was left to develop — or not develop — in cricket's long shadow.⁷ The result is a country that is a genuine sporting superpower in one game and a relative bystander in most others.
That is not a failing unique to India. Many countries are dominant in one discipline and unremarkable elsewhere. But India's scale makes the contrast more visible. A nation of 1.4 billion people winning 41 Olympic medals in total — while smaller European nations routinely finish higher up the table — is a gap that speaks directly to infrastructure, not to any shortage of physical talent or competitive spirit.¹
Cricket and Chess: Where India Does Dominate
It would be wrong, though, to paint India as simply absent from world sport. In cricket, India is not merely a strong team — it is the sport's economic and cultural center of gravity. India generates an estimated 80 percent of cricket's global revenue. The Indian Premier League reshaped the sport's financial architecture entirely. When the Board of Control for Cricket in India speaks, world cricket listens. That is a form of dominance as complete as anything seen in any sport, anywhere.⁸
Chess tells a similar, if smaller-scale, story. India has produced two world champions in the modern era — Viswanathan Anand, who held the title for a decade, and Gukesh Dommaraju, who in 2024 became the youngest world champion in history at just 18 years old.⁹ The current generation of Indian grandmasters is among the strongest in the world. Chess requires the same qualities that drive India's intellectual economy: pattern recognition, rigorous preparation, and the ability to operate at the intersection of logic and creativity. It is perhaps no accident that India excels here too.
The picture, then, is not weakness — it is concentration. India is a superpower in cricket, a rising power in chess, and a bystander in most other sports. That is a very different thing from broad athletic irrelevance.
Why Ideas Scale Better Than Medals
There is a deeper reason why India's intellectual influence outpaces its sporting footprint, and it comes down to how each kind of success actually spreads.
Intellectual output — software, research, engineering, patents, services — scales extraordinarily well across a large, educated population. Every additional IIT graduate, every new patent filed, every Indian-origin researcher who publishes a landmark paper adds to the cumulative weight of India's global knowledge footprint. The returns compound. The talent pool is enormous, the infrastructure (at least in the knowledge sector) is well-developed, and the English language gives Indian professionals direct access to global markets and institutions.¹⁰
Elite sport works the other way. It is a narrow funnel. A country of 1.4 billion produces, at most, a few thousand athletes capable of competing at the highest international level in any given discipline — and that number depends almost entirely on the quality of the ecosystem built to find and develop them. Without that ecosystem, population size is largely irrelevant. India's size is an asset in the knowledge economy because the whole system benefits from scale. In sport, size only helps if the infrastructure exists to convert it.¹¹
India's institutions have been far better at building knowledge infrastructure than sports infrastructure. That is a policy choice as much as a cultural one, and there are signs it is slowly changing — the recent Olympic investments and the emergence of athletes like Neeraj Chopra, the javelin thrower who won gold in Tokyo and silver in Paris, suggest a broader sports ecosystem is beginning to take shape. But that is a decades-long project, and it is still early.
The Right Way to Measure a Giant
The uncomfortable truth is that the world often defaults to sporting achievement as a proxy for national vitality — and by that proxy, India looks smaller than it is. That is a failure of imagination as much as anything else.¹²
A country whose engineers built a significant share of the global internet's backbone, whose diaspora leads some of the world's most powerful companies, whose patent filings are rising at double-digit rates,³ and whose chess grandmasters are rewriting the record books is not a country struggling for global relevance. It is a country whose relevance simply does not show up well on the Olympic scoreboard.
India's world role has been shaped by where its institutions were able to scale fastest — and that turned out to be ideas, talent, and digital production, not athletics.¹³ That is not a consolation prize. In a twenty-first century defined more by innovation, demographic weight, and technological capacity than by sprint times or penalty kicks, it may in fact be the better hand to hold.
Was the scoreboard, as it turns out, always measuring the wrong game?
Refs:
¹ International Olympic Committee, "Paris 2024 Olympics: India Medals Tally, Winners Table," Olympics.com, 2024, https://www.olympics.com/en/news/paris-2024-olympics-india-medals-tally-winners-table.
² NASSCOM Community, "Patent Pulse 2026: Filing Surge, Grant Slowdown — Quantifying India's Innovation Momentum," NASSCOM Insights, 2026, https://community.nasscom.in/communities/nasscom-insights/patent-pulse-2026-filing-surge-grant-slowdown-quantifying-indias.
³ Ibid.
⁴ Bhargavi Acharya and Aditya Kalra, "AI to Turbocharge Patent Creation in India Tech Hubs, Executives Say," Reuters, May 27, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/ai-turbocharge-patent-creation-india-tech-hubs-executives-say-2026-05-27/.
⁵ VK Law, "Rethinking Global Patent Strategy: India Belongs on the List," Imagine That IP Law Blog, 2025, https://www.vklaw.com/ImagineThatIPLawBlog/rethinking-global-patent-strategy-india-belongs-on-the-list.
⁶ Blue Rose Publishers, "Nobel Prize Winners in India," BlueroseOne, 2025, https://blueroseone.com/publish/nobel-prize-winners-in-india/.
⁷ Sidharth Monga, "India's Cricket Dominance: How the BCCI Became the Sport's Undisputed Power Broker," The Athletic / New York Times, June 17, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6415655/2025/06/17/india-cricket-kohli-dominance-england-australia/.
⁸ Ibid.
⁹ David Segal, "Gukesh Dommaraju Becomes Youngest Chess World Champion Ever," NBC News, December 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/india-gukesh-dommaraju-world-champion-chess-youngest-ever-rcna183913.
¹⁰ OAL Law, "Winning Beyond the Field: Why Intellectual Property Is the MVP of Modern Sports," OAL, 2025, https://oal.law/winning-beyond-the-field-why-intellectual-property-is-the-mvp-of-modern-sports/.
¹¹ Priya Rajan et al., "India's Knowledge Economy and the Sports Infrastructure Gap," Journal of Emerging Technology and Innovation Research 11, no. 10 (October 2024): 1–9, https://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2410383.pdf.
¹² Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, "India: Leaning to One Side, Cautiously," Harvard Kennedy School, 2025, https://www.belfercenter.org/research-analysis/india-leaning-one-side-cautiously.
¹³ NASSCOM Community, "Patent Pulse 2026."
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