I will demonstrate that it is not necessary to substantially break the mass degeneracy between the Standard Model Higgs boson doublet and the accompanying scalar leptoquark. More precisely, I will show that the experimental proton decay lifetime data cannot place any meaningful bound on the mass of the scalar leptoquark, a.k.a. the color triplet, if one includes effects of higher-dimensional operators. I use particle content of the Georgi-Glashow model for this demonstration but the proposed mechanism can also work in other popular unification frameworks. Interestingly enough, the complete suppression of proton decay via the scalar leptoquark mediation is not in any conflict with the partial suppression of the gauge mediated two-body proton decay signatures. Finally, I will introduce a method that yields a proper upper limit on the cutoff scale of the aforementioned higher-dimensional operators.