NITI Aayog Launches the India Science and Technology Scoreboard for All 36 States and Union Territories, With Tamil Nadu First in Research Papers and Patent Applications

NITI Aayog launched the India Science and Technology Scoreboard on 3 November 2026, an interactive dashboard that sets the research output, patent applications, institutions and startups of all 36 states and Union Territories side by side. Its first figures, for the financial year 2024-25, count 223,005 research publications and 62,934 patent applications for India. Tamil Nadu is first on both: 44,611 publications and 16,048 patent applications.

The platform is public at sts.niti.gov.in. It was unveiled by Ashok Kumar Lahiri, Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog, at the Civil Services Officers’ Institute on KG Marg in New Delhi, according to the release the Press Information Bureau (PIB) issued that evening.

What the dashboard holds

NITI Aayog describes the scoreboard as a tool for evidence-based policymaking and for benchmarking one state against another. Prof. Abhay Karandikar, the Aayog’s Member for Science and Technology, said research and innovation data had been scattered across many sources, which made it hard for a state to see where it stood. The scoreboard puts institution, startup, publication and patent data in one place, with trends over the years.

On the institutions side it covers higher education institutions, research and development institutions, deep-tech startups and incubators. On the output side it covers research publications and patents. Beyond raw counts, PIB says, it reports indicators of research quality, impact, collaboration and open access, across priority research areas and across three sectors: academia, government R&D laboratories and industry. ThePrint’s report puts the priority research areas at 11, among them clean energy, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, critical minerals and agriculture, and the dashboard’s own list matches that count.

Any two states or Union Territories can be placed side by side, and each has a profile listing its science and technology policies and best practices. The launch was followed by a walkthrough and a technical session on the methodology and data sources, and representatives of state governments said the platform would help their planning and the building of skilled staff at state level.

The national numbers for 2024-25

The dashboard’s national page gives India 223,005 research publications in 2024-25, which it puts at about 5.8 per cent of the world’s publications in the same database. BW Education reports the same two headline figures: 223,005 publications and 62,934 patent applications.

On quality, BW Education reports India’s Category Normalised Citation Impact (CNCI) at 0.89 for 2024-25, against a world average of 1.00. CNCI compares a paper’s citations with the average for papers of the same field, year and type, so a value above 1.00 means cited above the world norm. It also reports that 8.5 per cent of India’s papers were among the top 10 per cent most cited in the world, that 28.5 per cent appeared in journals in the top quarter of their field (Q1), and that 29.9 per cent involved an international collaborator. The dashboard’s national data show the same values.

For wider context, the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Global Innovation Index 2026 ranks India 38th of 139 economies, and its brief for India places the knowledge and technology outputs pillar, where scientific papers and patents sit, at 15th. The tuput article on India’s 38th place in the index goes through the pillars.

Tamil Nadu first, and who follows

In 2024-25 the five states and Union Territories with the most research publications were Tamil Nadu (44,611), Uttar Pradesh (29,298), Maharashtra (28,947), Karnataka (27,970) and Delhi (24,417). BW Education, PSU Watch (carrying a Press Trust of India report) and Swarajya agree on the Tamil Nadu figure, and the dashboard’s data tables give the same numbers.

On patent applications for the year, Tamil Nadu again leads with 16,048, followed by Maharashtra (8,567), Karnataka (8,413), Uttar Pradesh (5,375) and Telangana (5,200). Elets eGov reported these figures from the launch, and they match the dashboard. Tamil Nadu’s applications are about 25 per cent of the national total, and its papers about 20 per cent, though state shares of publications cannot be added up, for a reason explained below. Readers who want the context for the leading states can start from tuput’s guides to Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Karnataka.

The dashboard’s yearly tables show Tamil Nadu first on both counts in each of the four years it covers, FY2021-22 to FY2024-25. Its publications went from 33,213 to 44,611, a rise of about 34 per cent. Its patent applications went from 6,902 to 16,048, more than double, while the Maharashtra count over the same years went from 6,855 to 8,567. On quality, the dashboard shows Tamil Nadu at a CNCI of 1.00, with 9.9 per cent of its papers in the world’s top 10 per cent and 37 per cent involving international collaboration, against 8.5 and 29.9 per cent for India as a whole.

Four years of growth

The scoreboard carries four annual data sets, and the totals can be read as a trend. India’s publication count in the database went from 184,748 in FY2021-22 to 223,005 in FY2024-25, a rise of about 21 per cent, with a flat year in between (200,479 in FY2022-23 and 199,953 in FY2023-24). Patent applications went from 35,071 to 62,934, a rise of about 79 per cent.

Among states that had at least 1,000 papers in FY2021-22, tuput’s own arithmetic on the dashboard’s annual figures shows the fastest growth in Jharkhand (2,654 to 4,470), Uttarakhand (6,804 to 11,169), Chhattisgarh (1,513 to 2,424) and Punjab (9,801 to 15,565), each up by roughly 59 to 68 per cent. The dashboard lets any state run the same comparison for its own figures.

The sectors and the institutions

For 2024-25 the dashboard records 196,812 publications from academia, 39,145 from government R&D laboratories and 16,521 from industry. Because one paper can carry authors from more than one sector, these counts overlap and do not add to the national total. The same holds for patent applications: academia 44,855, industry 10,890 and government laboratories 1,382, figures that BW Education also reports.

BW Education lists the institutions and startups the scoreboard counts as 1,260 higher education institutions, 356 R&D institutions, 38,553 deep-tech startups and 390 incubators. The state tables on the dashboard add up to the same totals. The startup figure covers deep-tech companies only, so it sits well below the 2.47 lakh startups the government has recognised overall, which tuput’s Startup India explainer sets out.

How to read the figures

The dashboard’s own methodology page states the limits. Publication counts come from Clarivate’s Web of Science Core Collection through its InCites tool, and cover the papers indexed there and included in the analysis, not every form of research output. State counts overlap: a paper with authors in two states counts for both, which is why the 36 state figures add up to 321,950 while the national figure is 223,005. Patent figures are applications, drawn from Clarivate’s Derwent World Patents Index, which groups patent documents by invention, and Lakshadweep’s patent data is marked as not reported in the source.

Years are financial years, and the dashboard labels 2024-25 as FY2024. The scoreboard shows annual trends and does not publish multi-year rankings.

What NITI Aayog says comes next

Lahiri told the launch that the Centre could not do the work alone. ThePrint quotes him: “The Centre alone can’t do it. It calls for a more proactive and committed role from the states.” He also asked that fundamental research reach the factory floor, and urged every state and Union Territory to use the platform, citing what the Aayog calls cooperative and competitive federalism. Umesh V. Waghmare, Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology, said it adds a state-level picture to the national evidence base and pointed to the part state science councils and state universities play. For how the Aayog works with states more broadly, see tuput’s account of NITI Aayog and the zonal councils.

ThePrint reports that NITI Aayog’s next steps are periodic data updates, more engagement with states, and building the platform into a fuller source of India’s science and technology data, including global comparisons. None of the launch reports gives a date for the first update.