Uttar Pradesh has improved its performance by two places in the India Innovation Index 2021 -- a comprehensive tool for the evaluation and development of the country’s innovation ecosystem. UP has been ranked seventh amongst the major states as compared to ninth rank in the year 2020.
The India Innovation Index 2021 report was released by NITI Aayog in New Delhi on Thursday. Uttar Pradesh scored the highest in ‘Business Environment’, i.e., 40.80. It is due to improvement in overall business environment, high cluster strength and significant share of manufacturing and service sector as a percentage of GSDP.
UP has emerged as one of the top five states under the knowledge output pillar. This high score is an outcome of a rise in start-ups and new businesses. Commending the improvement, Chief Executive Officer of Invest UP, Abhishek Prakash, said, “Innovation-led entrepreneurship is key to Make in India and Aatmanirbhar Bharat’ programmes. We are determined to create an innovation-friendly environment to give further impetus to start-ups, manufacturing and services.”
With a score of 6.18, Uttar Pradesh has scored above the national average of 5.81 in Knowledge Diffusion due to a high share of ICT exports, hi-tech exports and citations. Knowledge Diffusion indicates knowledge absorption capacity of the state. It has two sub-pillars viz. knowledge dissemination and creative goods and services. Knowledge dissemination includes indicators linked to sectors that are key to innovation, such as software exports, hi-tech exports, high and medium hi-tech manufacturing entities.
India Innovation Index, prepared by NITI Aayog and the Institute for Competitiveness, is an assessment framework which ranks the states and the Union Territories on their innovation performance.
The third edition of the index released on Thursday by NITI Aayog 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) which are distributed across key pillars like human capital, investment, knowledge workers, business environment, safety and legal environment, knowledge output, and knowledge diffusion.