Spatial Modulation techniques (SMTs) offer an exceptional trade-off between spectral and energy efficiencies. In this work, we propose a new SMT termed as permutation index-quadrature spatial modulation (PI-QSM), aiming for enhanced spectral efficiency and better average bit error rate (ABER) performance compared to rival SMTs. To enhance spectral efficiency, PI-QSM exploits permutations of active transmit antennas by conveying additional information bits innovatively through indices of active antenna permutations. PI-QSM also alleviates the major constraint in some of the SMTs, where the total number of transmit antennas need to be a power of two. At any time instance, PI-QSM transmits real and imaginary parts of two complex modulated symbols separately using four different active antennas. To avoid any ambiguities at the receiver and to improve the error performance of the overall system, a rotation angle is introduced between the two modulated symbols before transmission. The rotation angle is optimized for different M-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellations using extensive Monte Carlo simulations. Performance of PI-QSM scheme is analyzed by deriving closed-form expressions for upper bound and asymptotic average bit error probability (ABEP) over Rayleigh fading channels. The Simulation results substantiate the accuracy of analytical analysis and also indicate that the proposed PI-QSM scheme offers better ABER performance than rival SMTs such as QSM and generalized QSM (GQSM). © 2019 Elsevier GmbH