India climbs to 60th position in innovation, investment, education : GII

In style, India climbed up six places as the top-ranked Central and South Asia in the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2017. Out of 130 nations, India was ranked 60^th, which is, as said by the Minister of Commerce and Industry, India’s improvement after five years of slide.

Switzerland secures the top spot for the seventh year this year, where Sweden, Netherlands, US and the UK are in the league of being the most innovative ones, according to GII. The index was generated by a collaboration of the Cornell University, INSEAD and World Intellectual Property Organization.

Realizing the great potential of innovation and creativity in India, a task force of innovation was set up under the shadow of the Minister of Commerce and Industry Nirmala Sitharaman.

The Task Force on Innovation had the injunction of assessing India’s position as an innovative country, suggest measures to enhance the innovation ecosystem in India and thus improve India’s ranking in the GII.

“The Team, comprising of government officials and experts from private organisations & academia, has come up with its report which gives specific measures the measures to improve India’s rank,” the official statement said.

“Opportunities have emerged to leverage the rise of new East Asia Innovation Tigers, fostering deeper regional innovation networks and benefiting from the rise of India,” finds the report.

Securing the 60^th spot, the nation ranks above Sri Lanka (90^th), Nepal (109^th), Pakistan (113) and Bangladesh (114^th) but is far behind China (22^nd).

The brilliant climb denotes the consistent improvement of India in investment, tertiary education, quality of its publication and universities, its ICT service exports and innovation clusters.

“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,” CII Director General Chandrajit Banerjee said.