Odisha slips to 16th rank in Innovation Index

BHUBANESWAR: After dropping below the national average in the poverty index, Odisha has slipped further to the 16th position in India Innovation Index to find a place among the bottom two states due to poor performance in different parameters. The State was placed in 12th position in the first edition of the Innovation Index in 2019 and 14th in the second edition in 2020.

As per the 2021 rankings released by NITI Aayog, Odisha scored 11.42 and placed just before Chhattisgarh among 17 major states. Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Bihar were the other three among the bottom five states. Among the enablers, Odisha was ranked 16th with a score of 15.19 and it stood 15th having scored 7.64 among the performers. While Karnataka was the table topper in the overall Innovation Index, Haryana topped the enablers’ list and Telangana was the first performer.

In the major states category, Odisha has a lower percentage of women employed with advanced degrees. With a score of 2.12, the State has only one per cent of women employed with advanced degrees. The number of private R&D units in the State (per lakh population) has also been low. Odisha scored the highest at 24.62 when it comes to Human Capital and got the lowest at 2.12 in Knowledge Worker, 3.46 in Knowledge Diffusion and 4.76 in Investment. It scored 22.8 on the Business Environment pillar, 21.66 in Safety and Legal Environment and 11.82 in Knowledge Output.

The State scored very less in ease of doing business (EoDB), incubators, bank accounts, social media monitoring cell, expenditure on R&D, venture capital deals, high-tech exports, industrial design and trade mark filing, knowledge-intensive employment, skill development training, police personnel and pendency percentage of corruption cases investigation.

The score was zero in EoDB, social media monitoring, venture capital deals and skill development training, 0.07 in FDI inflow as a percentage of State GDP, 0.09 in high and medium high tech manufacturing entities, 0.37 in knowledge-intensive employment, 0.4 in industrial design filed and 0.24 in the percentage of schools having Atal Tinkering Labs.  

The poor performance of Human Capital in terms of school and tertiary education has also affected the ranking and there is a gap in the performance of knowledge workers and its reflection in high tech exports.
The number of indicators has increased to 66 in the third edition from 36 in the second edition. The indicators are now distributed across 16 sub-pillars, which in turn form seven key pillars.