Karnataka Tops NITI Aayog Innovation List

Karnataka has bagged the top rank in NITI Aayog’s India Innovation Index, 2021, which determines innovation capacities and ecosystems at the sub-national level.

• The India Innovation Index is released by NITI Aayog and the Institute for Competitiveness every year.
• The index attempts to create an extensive framework for the continuous evaluation of the innovation environment in all States and Union Territories; it ranks them based on their scores.
• This is the third edition of the Report, which highlights the scope of innovation analysis in the country by drawing on the framework of the Global Innovation Index.
• The number of indicators has increased from 36 (in the India Innovation Index 2020) to 66 (in the India Innovation Index 2021).
• Categories: The Innovation Index is divided into three categories—major states, Union Territories, and hill and North East states.

Indicators Used:

• There are 7 pillars in the index - five ‘Enabler’ pillars measure the inputs and two ‘Performance’ pillars measure the output.
  • The indicators that the survey uses include the level and quality of education and parameters such as:
  • Several Ph.D. students and knowledge-intensive employment.
  • Enrolment in engineering and technology and several highly skilled professionals.
  • Investment in R&D and number of patents and trademark applications filed.
  • Internet subscribers.
  • FDI inflows, business environment, and safety and legal environment.

Key-highlights of the findings

• Major States: Karnataka topped with a score of 18.05 followed by Telangana and Haryana.
  • Bottom States: Bihar, Odisha, and Chhattisgarh scored the lowest on the index, which put them at the bottom in the “major States” category. Chhattisgarh ranked last with 10.97 points.
• Hill and North-East States: Manipur is leading the category followed by Uttarakhand and Meghalaya.Nagaland ranked last (10^th).
• Union territories/Small States: Chandigarh is the top performer with a Score of 27.88 followed by Delhi and Andaman and Nicobar.

Challenges

• On average, the country has not performed well in the knowledge worker pillar, as much as it has in the human capital pillar.
• The expenditure on human capital has been unable to create that knowledge base in the country.
• Innovation is skewed against the manufacturing sector due to the problems pertaining to and the missing middle.
• Missing middle,e., there are too many tiny, informal enterprises, and too few large, formal ones to employ thousands of people.

Recommendations

• GDERD (Gross Domestic Expenditure on R&D) needs considerable improvement and should touch at least 2%, which would play an instrumental role in India achieving the goal of a 5 trillion economy and further influence its innovative footprint across the globe.
  • Increasing GDERD promotes private sector participation in R&D and closes the gap between industry demand and what the country produces through its education systems.
  • Countries that spend less on GDERD fail to retain their human capital in the long run and the ability to innovate is dependent on the quality of human capital; India’s GDERD as a percentage of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) stood at about 0.7%.
• The private sector needs to pick up pace in R&D, public expenditure is productive up to some extent; once the growth follows a trajectory, it is desirable to shift to R&D mostly driven by the private sector.