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Despite India’s low ranking in the Global Hunger Index, Modi government is hesitant to address the issue
Published : Nov 16, 2023 11:00 IST -T.K. RAJALAKSHMI
The Global Hunger Index 2023 has ranked India 111 out of 125 countries with sufficient data to estimate hunger levels, provoking India to once again take exception to the methodology used by the hunger audit and impute “mala fide intent”.
Around mid October each year, two global organisations, Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide, release the Global Hunger Index (GHI) report, which ranks countries according to hunger and undernutrition prevalence levels in the population. For the last two decades, the GHI has been a tool to track hunger at global, regional and national levels. Its main objective is to get governments to take greater notice of hunger levels.
Governments rarely object vehemently to the ranking, which makes India a notable exception. India has been expressing pique at the GHI findings, particularly since 2014 when the Narendra Modi regime came to power. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, through the Women and Child Ministry, has for the second time faulted the ranking, saying the GHI “continues to be an erroneous measure of hunger with serious methodological issues and shows a malafide intent”.
One complaint is that the GHI does not take into account the government’s initiatives to address hunger. But the GHI is not designed to audit the achievements of governments; it reports things as they stand.
The GHI is calculated on the basis of a set of globally agreed parameters and relies heavily on data in the public domain, supplied by the United Nations and other multilateral agencies. Some of them are international UN bodies such as Unicef, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO). The countries that met the criteria for inclusion in the GHI report numbered 136, but data were insufficient in 11 countries. Where data were insufficient or original source data were unavailable, estimates were based on the latest data available. Some countries with insufficient data were provisionally designated as showing “alarming” levels of hunger; the report says that had data been available, these countries would have been categorised as “severely alarming” because of the conflict situation prevalent there. This shows that GHI scores tend to err on the conservative side.
The GHI report for 2023 makes certain general observations on global hunger, especially in the backdrop of the Ukraine-Russia conflict and the COVID pandemic preceding it. Years of advancement in reversing or slowing down global hunger came to a standstill after 2015. The “era of polycrisis”, a term used in the report, had affected younger populations disproportionately. The under-25 population comprised around 42 per cent of the world’s population. Regionally, hunger levels in South Asia and South of the African Sahara were found to be among the worst. Hunger levels were either serious or alarming in 43 countries. The report cautions against making year-to-year comparisons. For comparisons over time, the authors suggest that the scores of 2000, 2008 and 2015 can be used.
The scores use four component indicators: undernourishment (proportion of population with insufficient calorie intake), child stunting (proportion of children under five with low height for age, indicating chronic undernutrition), child wasting (children under five with low weight for their height, reflecting acute undernutrition), and child mortality (proportion of children who die before the age of five). These indicators reflect insufficiencies in calorie intake as well as micronutrient deficiencies. By combining the proportion of the undernourished in the population and the indicators on child health, the GHI estimates the food supply situation of the population as a whole and the effects of inadequate nutrition within a particularly vulnerable subset of the population.
The report is peer-reviewed and the indicators are globally recognised because they are part of the indicator set to measure progress towards Sustainable Development Goals, the deadline for which is 2030. One of the goals, SDG 2, is zero hunger; India is a signatory to the commitment.
