New Delhi (PTI): Sustained investment on women's health and education may spur the economic growth in BRIC nations, especially in a country like India that has the maximum potential, investment banking giant Goldman Sachs says.

According to a book released by Goldman Sachs, there is a significant upside potential to its growth projections for BRIC nations if innovative and sustained investments towards the women's health and education are made there.

The term 'BRIC' refers to the world's four fastest growing emerging economies Brazil, Russia, India and China and had been first coined in 2001 by Goldman Sachs.

The book titled 'BRICs and Beyond' is a compilation of Goldman Sachs' recent research reports on the four nations and the changing nature of the global economy.

In a chapter related to women of the region, 'Women Hold up half the sky', the investment bank has said India has the worst relative performance on nearly every measure the book evaluated.

"Indian women have the lowest labour-force participation rate, the lowest share of parliamentarians, the lowest life expectancy, the lowest literacy rate, the lowest level of enrolment in tertiary education, and the highest maternal mortality rate," the research found.

The research paper said addressing these problems would require significant investment and innovative policies.

"If India can achieve this, we could see considerable upside to our current BRICs projections, " the Goldman Sachs research paper said.

According to Goldman Sachs since 2001 the four countries' equity markets have seen a remarkable increase in their value.

Brazil has risen by 369 per cent, India by 499 per cent, Russia by 630 per cent, and China by 201 per cent, using the A-share market.

In terms of literacy the BRIC nations score well, in China the female literacy rates match the global average for men, while it exceeds in Brazil and Russia.

This is true even though the gap between men and women in China is relatively high (nine percentage points).

Meanwhile, India lags behind with the male literacy trailing the global average at 73 per cent and the rate for women way below 50 per cent.

However, both men and women have posted an improvement of around 12 percentage points since 1990, it said.

Interestingly, Russia stands out with literacy rates for both men and women at nearly 100 per cent, a notch higher than in the high-income countries, the research reveals.

Among the BRICs, India is the clear laggard at every level of education. There are roughly nine women in primary school for every 10 men, eight in secondary school and seven in tertiary compared with 13 in Brazil and 14 in Russia.

Further, India's per capita rates of maternal and neo-natal deaths are remarkably high for a country without a recent history of war or ethnic strife, with 540 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, it shows.

Brazil also scores poorly with more than four times as many maternal deaths as China.