Vice Chairman, NITI Aayog
Innovation has always been a driver of change and progress in any economy as it disrupts traditional practices and businesses. It also generates breakthroughs in both product and process technologies.
Over the last few years, the Government of India has made innovation a priority to realise the goal of ‘New India’. Most significantly, the Atal Innovation Mission has been a country-wide effort to promote a culture of innovation from the level of schools to industry. NITI Aayog has played a leading role in the flagship initiative with significant results.
In order to further drive a culture of innovation across Indian states, the NITI Aayog has come up with its first-ever India Innovation Index, a tool that will help create a conducive environment for innovation to take strong roots and flourish across the country. Such an index will not only help states to devise their own strategy for fostering an innovation climate, it will also enable them to benchmark their performance with other states.
The index has been grouped under two main headings; enablers—factors that will drive innovation in the states and union territories—and performance, that will measure the actual outcome. The India Innovation Index report also focuses on a number of drivers for both enablers and performance of any State/UT.
Hopefully, this will not only lead to healthy competition among the states in terms of boosting their innovative capacities. It would also strengthen the bonds of cooperative federalism with states learning from one another to improve their innovative outcomes.
I congratulate the entire team of NITI Aayog for their unique and laudable effort. My compliments to Central Ministries, States Nodal Officers and our knowledge partner, Institute for Competitiveness, CII for their contributions towards preparing this index.
