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K’taka and Tamil Nadu top innovation index; Bihar, Jharkhand fare poorly
New Delhi: Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra top Niti Aayog’s innovation index released Thursday, followed by Telangana, Haryana, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, West
New Delhi: Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra top Niti Aayog’s innovation index released Thursday, followed by Telangana, Haryana, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Gujarat, and Andhra Pradesh in the listing of major states while Chhattisgarh, Bihar and Jharkhand were ranked lowest.
The states have been bifurcated into three categories; major states, north-east and hill states, and union territories.
Among the North East and hill states Sikkim, Himachal and Uttarakhand ranked on top while Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalya were among the bottom ranked states. Among Union Territories, Delhi was on top followed by Chandigargh and Goa.
NITI Aayog along with the Institute for Competitiveness released the report with the aim of providing a comprehensive snapshot of the innovation ecosystem of 29 states and seven union territories.
The apex think-tank also ranked Delhi, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Uttar Pradesh as the most efficient states in translating inputs into output.
“The index shows that the innovation ecosystem of the country is strong in south and western parts of India. In fact, three of the top five major states are from southern India. Delhi and Haryana seem to be an exception to this rule and seem to be doing well on the Index. Thus, there seems to be a west-south and north-east divide across the country,” the report states.
Delhi’s chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said, “Congratulations to all Delhiites for coming first in Niti Aayog’s Innovation Index Delhi govt’s investments into high quality education, health and infrastructure are showing results.”
The index is calculated as the average of scores of its two dimensions: enablers and performance. The report defines five enablers that act as inputs to the innovation environment: human capital, investment, knowledge employment, business environment and safety and legal environment. The two performance pillars are knowledge output and knowledge diffusion.
“In order to further drive a culture of innovation across Indian states, Niti Aayog has come up with its first-ever innovation index, a tool that will help create a conducive ecosystem for innovation to flourish across the country...hopefully, this will to healthy competition among the states in terms of boosting their innovative capacities,” Niti Aayog vice chairman Rajiv Kumar said.
Karnataka is the leader in the overall rankings in the category of major states. Karnataka’s number one position in the overall ranking is partly attributed to its top rank in the performance dimension in the report. It is also among the top performers in infrastructure, knowledge workers, knowledge output and business environment.
“Proud moment for us, as Karnataka tops NITI Aayog ‘s first ever India Innovation Index...,” Karnataka CM
BS Yediyurappa said.
Among the category of major states, Maharashtra performs the best in the dimension of enablers. This implies that it has the best enabling environment for innovation, even though the state comes in at the third position in the overall innovation index. Under the human capital parameter among major states, southern states Tamil Nadu and Kerala perform well on producing human capital on an average.
Haryana tops the list under safety and legal environment while Tamil Nadu ranks lowest.
“The broad level learning and some policy imperatives at the national level include increasing the spending on research and development, improving the capability of top rung educational institutions in the country to produce greater innovation outputs. There is also a need for greater coordination and collaboration between the industry and educational institutions for enhancing innovation capability,” the report said.
