India ranks 81 among 141 countries on the Global Innovation Index

Behind Brazil, China and South Africa; Switzerland tops the list

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India ranks 81 out of 141 countries on the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2015, well behind middle income countries such as Brazil, China and South Africa. But, in the Central and Southern Asia region, it retains its top stop in the regional ranking, followed by Kazakhstan and Sri Lanka. Globally, Switzerland, followed by the United Kingdom, Sweden, Netherlands and the US are ranked as the most innovative countries in the world.

The GII 2015, released on Thursday, is calculated on the basis of how a country fares on seven key parameters - institutions, human capital and research, infrastructure, market sophistication, business sophistication, knowledge and technology outputs and creative outputs.

According to the report, top scoring middle income economies, such as China, Brazil and India are closing the gap with the developed world on innovation quality, in large part fuelled by an improvement in the quality of higher education institutions.

India, along with China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Jordan, Kenya and Uganda, is part of a group of countries that are outperforming their economic peers, with India being one of the eight economies that can be signalled as innovation achievers outperforming their peers on overall score.

Despite falling five positions in the overall rankings since 2014, India, along with 10 other developing countries, is now categorised as innovation outperformers. The "relative fall in India's overall ranking this year is due to availability of old data up-to 2103-14 period, and it does not truly reflect the performance of the economy in last one year" said Chandrajit Banerjee, director general of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). "The new innovation policies put in place by the new Indian government, which are not yet effectively captured by the data used in the GII", he added.

The report says India's strength lies in knowledge diffusion (ranked 34th), research & development (44th), general infrastructure (43rd) and investment (42nd). On innovation quality, it ranks 3rd among middle income countries, behind Brazil.

The report notes that this year, the country has made substantial improvements in patents filed.

But despite its notable achievements, the report contends that "India still needs to implement substantial reforms in its innovation policy to further improve its innovation performance." The country has consistently "performed poorly during the past four years in political stability, ease of starting a business, tertiary inbound mobility and environmental performance" it adds.

India's poor performance on the ease of doing business is well recorded. The country ranks 142 on the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business. The revised rankings are likely to be released later this month, which will shed light on the progress made by the country on improving the ease of doing business over the past year.

On the innovation sub-indices, the country performs poorly on institutions (ranked 104th) and infrastructure (87th), with the report noting that its position has deteriorated in human capital and research (103rd), market sophistication (72nd), business sophistication (116th) and creative outputs (95th).