MANISH GUPTA
Ranchi, July 21: Jharkhand has significantly improved its position in India Innovation Index 2021, released by NITI Aayog on Thursday, to 10th rank among 17 major states from the 15th position in the previous ranking.
The top three states in the category of major states are Karnataka, Telangana and Haryana in that order, the NITI Aayog said in a statement on its third edition of the index jointly prepared with the Institute for Competitiveness.
“The India Innovation Index embodies the spirit of competitive federalism and is designed to be a comprehensive resources tool for state and union level policymakers to understand as well as to enhance the innovation performance across key parameters,” NITI Aayog Vice Chairman Suman Bery said at the launch in New Delhi.
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, the NITI Aayog said.
“Jharkhand being one of the important states with respect to industries, the state’s enhancement in innovation can boost its performance,” the India Innovation Index 2021 said, adding that as Jharkhand is a poor state, efforts concentrated around nurturing innovation can change the game for Jharkhand enabling it to climb the ladder.
It may be noted that Jharkhand stood at the bottom along with Chhattisgarh and Bihar in the previous innovation index released in January last year. However, in today’s index it has bagged the 10th rank beating states like Gujarat, Rajasthan and Odisha.
Interestingly, Jharkhand’s ranking is better as ‘Performers’ than as ‘Enablers’ in the category of 17 major states reflecting that the state generated better outcomes despite comparative lack in enabling factors that promote innovation in the state.
Jharkhand stood at 12th position in the index of ‘Enablers’ but bagged 9th rank in the list of ‘Performers’. It was the opposite in the previous ranking. While it was 15th in overall innovation, its rank was 13th as ‘Enablers’ and 16th in ‘Performance’.
To have a comprehensive understanding of innovation in a state, the index measures both the input as well as output variables. Human capital, investment, knowledge workers, business environment, safety and legal environment are the indicators that show the extent to which a state has created an environment to promote innovation. The two pillars for performance are knowledge output and knowledge diffusion.
With regards to human capital, Jharkhand was able to register an impressive improvement of about 50 percentage points, in percentage of schools with ICT labs rising from about 23 per cent to about 73 per cent. Enrolment in PhD also witnessed a slight improvement, contrary to pupil-teacher ratio which remained poor at 60:1. The state’s FDI inflow as a percentage of GSDP also decreased from about 8 per cent to 5.5 per cent.
The third edition of the index, which draws on the framework of the Global Innovation Index, is set against the backdrop of Covid-19 pandemic. It has expanded the number of indicators from 36 in the previous index to 66 in the third edition across seven key pillars.
