How the States Were Ranked

The India Today Group’s State of the States study was conducted by Nielsen, a global information, data and measurement company. The data for the parameters ( see table) under every category— agriculture, health, education, infrastructure, economy, law and order, governance, inclusive development, tourism, entrepreneurship and environment and cleanliness— were collected from recognised and highly credible government and academic sources. The parameters are normalised so as to ensure that comparisons across states are meaningful. Two sets of data were examined— the performance of the states in 2015- 16 in all the parameters and their improvement between 2010- 11 and 2015- 16. In the category of entrepreneurship, only the data for 2015- 16 was examined, as consistent and reliable data on improvement was not available. While scrutinising the data for 2015- 16, every parameter of each category was ranked. The rank varied based on the parameter under consideration. For instance, a higher concentration of households with electricity gets a higher rank whereas a higher incidence of crime elicited a lower rank. The final composite rank is simply the equally weighted average of each of the parameters. This yielded a category- specific rank for each state. The same process was repeated while examining the improvement of states across all parameters. The final results were achieved after combining the ranks ( see table) of the states in every category based on the statistics of 2015- 16 and improvement shown in data between 2010- 11 and 2015- 16. In short, the best performing state = Rank ( current) + Rank ( improvement).