Karnataka, Manipur, Chandigarh, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu have emerged five top states in their respective categories in the third edition of NITI Aayog’s India Innovation Index (III) 2021. While Karnataka has topped again in the ‘Major States’ category, Manipur is leading the ‘North East and Hill States’ category and Chandigarh is the top performer in the ‘Union Territories and City States’ category. ‘’Innovation is the key to sustainable and inclusive growth. It can help us solve the biggest challenges of our times: bringing millions out of poverty, generating livelihood opportunities, and paving the way for an Aatmanirbhar Bharat,’ said NITI Aayog member Dr VK Saraswat.
The India Innovation index lays down the broad pillars on which the country’s innovation landscape is determined. The innovation index is based on 7 pillars: human capital, investment, knowledge workers, business environment, safety and legal environment, knowledge output, and knowledge diffusion. These pillars were divided across 66 indicators to determine the innovation capacity of states/UTs.
According to III, Maharashtra being one of the biggest states in India, its performance is crucial for overall development of the country. In this regard, the state improved its Distance from the Frontier (DTF) by about 20 units. The state improved its percentage of schools with ICT labs by a great extent from about 44% to 71%, a 27-percentage point increase. In higher education, the enrollment in Ph.D. also increased from about 7 (per lakh of population) to about 10.
For instance, in Maharashtra, high enrolment in PhD has not been entirely reflected in the patents filed in that region. Similarly, there is a gap in the performance of knowledge workers and its reflection in high tech exports. Although there is no direct relation between the two, it is expected that they move in the same direction.
However, the state’s performance was more or less same across other pillars on the ‘enablers’ side with some even showing a downfall which requires concentrated efforts, for example cluster strength. This was reflected in the ‘performers’ as well, whereby
the performance marginally improved in the respective pillars, despite showing improvement in the human capital pillar, along with witnessing a decline in indicators like publication score and citation score.
‘’Thus, the state was not able to improve to a great extent; a major change was only witnessed in the human capital pillar. This reflects concentrated growth and not collective growth. Thus, the state needs to devise a mechanism for collective growth so that it gets reflected in the ‘performers’. This would enable the state to enhance its ecosystem, something that cannot be sustained only on the premise of human capital,’’ it said.
