Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Telangana bagged the top three positions in the State Health Index report, released by government think-tank NITI Aayog. The states led the overall performance among large states.
The report, titled “Healthy States, Progressive India”, ranks states and Union Territories on their year-on-year incremental performance in health outcomes as well as their overall status. Kerala has been the best overall performer for four consecutive years now.
The fourth edition of the report saw Uttar Pradesh, which ranked at the bottom (Rank 19) in overall performance, register the highest incremental change from the base year (2018-19) to reference year (2019-20).
Among the smaller states, Mizoram emerged as the best performer in both overall and incremental performance. When it came to the UTs, Delhi and Jammu & Kashmir ranked among the bottom in terms of overall performance but emerged as leaders in incremental performance.
Among the 19 larger states, four improved their rankings while five states fell down the ladder; ten retained their base year rank. Three out of the eight smaller states improved their rankings, four deteriorated while one retained its rank. Compared to the base year, four UTs improved their rank while three fared worse compared to earlier.
Assam made the maximum improvement by moving up three ranks (from 15 to 12). On the other hand, Andaman & Nicobar registered the maximum drop in rank (from 4 to 7).
The State Health Index is a weighted-composite index based on 24 indicators grouped under the domains of ‘Health Outcomes’, ‘Governance and Information’, and ‘Key Inputs/Processes’. Each domain has been assigned weights based on its importance with higher score for outcome indicators. To ensure comparison among similar entities, the ranking is categorized as ‘Larger States’, ‘Smaller States’ and ‘Union Territories’.
The Health Index Round IV 2019-20 does not capture the impact of COVID-19 on health outcomes or any of the other indicators as the Index Performance relates to Base Year (2018-19) and Reference Year (2019-20), largely the pre-COVID-19 period.
