 "Low govt effectiveness, infra scores check India's progress on innovation index")
Despite rising 15 places from 81 last year to 66 in the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2016, India continues to lag in several areas important for growth of business and industry such as government effectiveness, infrastructure and knowledge creation.
The report, set to be officially released by Commerce and Industry minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Friday, shows India maintaining its top position among countries in the central and south Asia region. However, it also shows neighbouring China moving up the rankings and joining the world’s 25 most-innovative economies, becoming the first middle-income country to enter the top 25 nations.
Switzerland, Sweden, the UK and the US lead the rankings. The annual report, published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), assesses countries on seven major indicators with 84 sub-indicators that range across the political, social, educational and financial spectrum.
Among these, the sub-index for government effectiveness, which captures the perceptions of quality of civil services and degree of their independence from political pressures and the quality of policy formulation and implementation, India is ranked at 82, the same as last year.
India has also moved down in the rule of law sub-index, from 63 last year to 66 now. The index points at lowered perceptions regarding the quality of contract enforcement, property rights, the police, and courts, as well as the likelihood of crime and violence.
In the infrastructure indicator, India has stayed put in the 87th rank, not having progressed in the use of information technology.
On the knowledge creation indicator, which includes the number and quality of national patent applications and the number of scientific and technical papers published, India has inched up from 59 last year to 57 this year.
Major efforts to ease patent applications and examination processes as well as introducing the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) policy will lead to a bigger jump in rankings next year, a senior official of the Department of Industrial policy and Promotion (DIPP) said.
The government aims to reduce the time taken to examine patents to 18 months by March 2018 and is on track to meeting this goal, the official added.
In May, about 458 new examiners had been hired to help the existing 130. The cost of filing too has been revised. On the other hand, the effectiveness of the Intellectual Property Rights policy, launched in May with the aim of leveraging IPR to reap economic and social benefits on a large scale, has been called into question.
“An indiscriminate push has been provided to registering patents and generating IP assets, but the measures to link these with long-term innovation growth has been absent in the policy,” says Shamnad Basheer, a lawyer part who was of the original think-tank constituted to draft the policy.
However, the country’s efforts to improve the ease of doing business have reflected in India moving up 11 places to 114 from 125 last year.
The report said India has all the ingredients needed to become a global driver of innovation, including strong market potential, an excellent talent pool, and an underlying culture of frugal innovation. India ranks second on innovation quality among middle-income economies, overtaking Brazil. “Relative weaknesses exist in the indicators for business environment, education expenditures, new business creations and the creative goods and services production,” it said.
