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News: Recently, a report on “Investment Friendliness Index” was released by NITI Aayog.
About Investment Friendliness Index

- It presents a structured and data-driven framework for assessing how effectively States and Union Territories create, enable, and sustain an environment conducive to investments.
- Released by: This report is released by NITI Aayog.
- This is NITI Aayog’s first -ever Investment Friendliness Index (IFI).
- It evaluates key policy, institutional, regulatory, and infrastructure-related parameters that influence investment decisions and provides a comparative assessment of the investment ecosystem across States and Union Territories.
- Focus: It seeks to foster competitive and cooperative federalism by encouraging States and Union Territories to adopt best practices and undertake continuous reforms in pursuit of the vision of Viksit Bharat @2047.
- Indicators and pillars: It evaluates States across 84 indicators under eight key pillars with different weightages that determine investment readiness: infrastructure (25 percent), business climate (20 percent), resources (15 percent), government policy (10 percent), regulatory ease (12 percent), financial health (7 percent), institutional environment (6 percent), and environmental resilience (5 percent).
- Performance of states:
- Gujarat has secured the top position, followed by Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.
- The Index identifies Gujarat’s policy stability and investor-centric governance as among the State’s biggest strengths.
- In the hilly and North-Eastern category, Uttarakhand ranked first, followed by Assam and Himachal Pradesh.
- Among UTs and city states, Goa topped the rankings, followed by Delhi and Chandigarh.
- Gujarat has secured the top position, followed by Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.
- Classification: The report classifies states into four categories: Top performers, frontrunners, emerging performers and aspiring states.
- Five states have been identified as top performers, while 15 have been placed in the frontrunners category, including Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh.
- Eight states and UTs including Punjab, West Bengal, Bihar, J&K have been categorised as emerging performers.
- Another eight including Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur have been placed in the aspiring states category.



