India ranked 107 out of 121 countries in the Global Hunger Index 2022.
Key points
- The index has been published by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerlife.
- India dropped from its previous 101st position last year.
- At 121, Yemen is last on the list.
- In Asia, Afghanistan with a rank of 109 is the only country behind India. Neighbouring countries – Pakistan (99), Bangladesh (84), Nepal (81) and Sri Lanka (64) have all fared better than India.
About Global Hunger Index (GHI)
- The Global Hunger Index (GHI), a tool aimed at ‘comprehensively measuring and tracking hunger at global, regional, and national levels’ gave India a score of 29.1, and labelled the level of hunger in the country as “serious”.
- The index, published since 2000, aims to capture the ‘multidimensional nature’ of hunger, and each country’s GHI score is calculated based on a formula that combines four indicators-undernourishment, child stunting, child wasting and child mortality.
- The GHI score is calculated on a 100-point scale reflecting the severity of hunger, where zero is the best score (no hunger) and 100 is the worst.
- Undernourishment prevalence rose in India from 14.6 per cent in 2018-2020 to 16.3 per cent in 2019-2021. This translates into 224.3 million people in India being undernourished out of the total 828 million people globally.
- Child wasting which is a strong predictor of mortality among children under five years of age also worsened from 15.1 per cent in 2012-16 to 19.3 per cent in 2017-21.
- India, however, noted improvement in two parameters of child stunting from 38.7 per cent in 2012-16 to 35.5 per cent in 2017-21 and child mortality from 4.6 per cent in 2014 to 3.3 per cent in 2020.
- Undernourishment: the share of the population with insufficient caloric intake.
- Child stunting: the share of children under age five who have low height for their age, reflecting chronic undernutrition.
- Child wasting: the share of children under age five who have low weight for their height, reflecting acute undernutrition.
India rejects report
- India on October 15, rejected the report by saying that it is a consistent effort to taint India’s image as a Nation that does not fulfill the food security and nutritional requirements of its population.
- Government says, that the index is an erroneous measure of hunger and suffers from serious methodological issues.
- Three out of the four indicators used for calculation of the index are related to health of Children and cannot be representative of the entire population.
- The fourth and most important indicator estimate of Proportion of Undernourished (PoU) population is based on an opinion poll conducted on a very small sample size of 3000.
- The report is not only disconnected from ground reality but also chooses to deliberately ignore efforts made by the Government to ensure food Security for the population especially during the Covid Pandemic.
