Manipur tops ‘India Innovation index’, Nagaland at bottom

Manipur has topped the third edition of NITI Aayog’s ‘India Innovation Index 2021’ released on Thursday, under the ‘North East and Hill States’ category while Nagaland has been placed at the bottom.
In the Major states category index, Karnataka topped the list while Chandigarh scored over others in the union territory category.
Among several categories, Manipur scored best in the knowledge workers and safety and legal environment pillars while Nagaland and Tripura scored the lowest due to their unutilised talent as indicated by their low performance in human capital and business environment, which indicates that their innovation capabilities have not been harnessed to their full potential. Manipur also topped on indicators like Research & Development expenditure as a percentage of GSDP, while Arunachal Pradesh scored highest on indicators like expenditure on science, technology and environment as a percentage of GSDP. It also received high FDI inflow in ‘North-Eastern and Hilly States’ category.
In this category, it was observed that ‘North-Eastern and Hilly States’ performance was relatively poor. Their respective scores were even lower than the average pillar score of 6.26. For example, Nagaland, Tripura and Meghalaya scored 2.15, 1.32 and 1.54, respectively. The performance of these states was greatly affected due to geographical location. While, geographical disadvantage is a challenge, measures can be roped in to enhance overall performance, with respect to improvement in performance under this pillar, the report stated. There was nil data on FDI inflow for states like Mizoram, Sikkim, Manipur, Meghalaya, Tripura and Nagaland.
In Human capital pillar, Mizoram topped with a score of 35.23 while Assam was at the bottom with a score of 24.44
The third edition of innovation index was released on Thursday by NITI Aayog vice chairman Suman Bery in the presence of member VK Saraswat, CEO Parameswaran Iyer, and senior adviser Neeraj Sinha, and Institute for Competitiveness chairman Amit Kapoor. The index has been brought out by Niti Aayog and the Institute for Competitiveness.
It highlights a comprehensive tool towards the country’s innovation ecosystem by ranking the states and UTs based on various paradigms and building competition amongst each other for better growth and development of states and UTs. 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.
Launching the index, Iyer said that innovation index was part of their effort to capture innovation happening in various parts of the country as it has a bearing on sustainable and inclusive growth and development of the nation.