According to the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2017., India is ranked to 60th place among the list of 130 nations. India has moved six places to acquire top ranked economy in Central and South Asia. India has acquired this position after five years of continuous drop in rankings. While top positions are taken by Switzerland, Sweden, Netherlands, the US, and the UK respectively as the most innovative countries.
The index, co-authored by Cornell University, INSEAD and World Intellectual Property Organisation shows India’s rise as an emerging innovation center in Asia, although the country ranks far behind China which occupied the 22nd spot. However, India’s rise has benefited a host of the neighboring countries. Among the neighbors, Sri Lanka took 90th spot whereas Nepal at 109th position. Pakistan and Bangladesh at 113 and 114 position respectively.
After recognizing India’s potential to reach great heights in innovation and creativity, a task force on innovation was set up by Commerce and Industries Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
The report said, “As demonstrated in the GII for some years, India has consistently outperformed on innovation relative to its GDP per capita. Recently, it made important strides in innovation input and output performance”.
The improvement of India’s ranking is due to increment in investment, tertiary education, quality of its publications and universities, its ICT services exports and innovation clusters.
GII Director General Chandrajit Banerjee said, “Public policy plays a pivotal role in creating an enabling environment conducive to innovation. Since the last two years, we have seen important activities around the GII in India like the formation of India’s high-level task force on innovation and consultative exercises on both innovation policy and better innovation metrics”.