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Goa bags Most Improved State Award
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Goa has been ranked as the most improved state (consumer markets) in the Small State Category at the State of the States Conclave 2011 organised by India Today magazine in New Delhi on Thursday.
The Union Finance Minister, Mr Pranab Mukherjee distributed the awards. The state’s Secretary (Information & Publicity), Mr Rajeev Verma received the award from Mr Mukherjee at a function held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in the national capital. The dignitaries attending the function applauded Goa’s progress as an improved state in the country.
To rank states, there are two broad roads to follow. First, is to administer questionnaires and respondents reply to specific questions. This route, however, presumes that respondents know about all the states you wish to rank. Second, is to use objective data. There's a third alternative of splicing subjective and objective, but that's neither here nor there. India Today used the objective route, relying solely on data from central sources, so that non-comparability of data across states was not an issue.
To obtain a state's performance under any one head, variables have to be aggregated. They used principal components analysis (PCA), which churns out weights in the estimation process. Accordingly, for each head, they have scores for each state. Hence, the eight heads are aggregated into an overall performance index for each state. All the data is publicly available and is sourced from government and related organisations. However, in understanding the development of a state, what is important is not the base level score, but its increment. And this year we move to emphasizing the changes in the scores. The base level depends on various historical factors and incremental improvements provide a lot of impetus for growth. Using the increments in scores, states are ranked for each head on the basis of their improvement.
Source: The NavHind Times, Nov 7, 2011
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