Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Oct 12: India has rejected the World Hunger Index (GHI) report which placed it at 111 among 125 countries and claimed that it continued to be a “flawed measure of ‘hunger’ and does not reflect India’s true position.”
The central government in a statement after the release of the report on Thursday said, “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 the health of children and cannot be representative of the entire population,” the government said.
The Global Hunger Report 2023 released by Ireland non-profit Concern Worldwide and Germany’s Welt Hunger Hilfe ranked India at 111 among 125 countries, with its progress against hunger nearly halted since 2015, reflecting a global trend. The Union government, though, contested India’s performance for the third year in a row, citing flawed methodology. Afghanistan, Haiti and 12 sub-Saharan countries perform worse than India on the GHI.
According to the report, India with a score of 28.7 in the Global Hunger Index-2023, has a level of hunger that is serious. India’s standing is worse than most of its neighbouring countries despite their economic slowdown. Pakistan (102th), Bangladesh (81st), Nepal (69th) and Sri Lanka (60th) have fared better than India in the index.
India’s ranking is based on a Global Hunger Index score of 28.7 on a 100-point scale where 0 is the best score (no hunger) and 100 is the worst. This categorises India’s severity of hunger as “serious.” The GHI score is based on a formula which combines four indicators that together capture the multi-dimensional nature of hunger, including under-nourishment, child stunting, child wasting, and child mortality.
While India made significant strides between 2000 and 2015, with its score improving from 38.4 in 2000 to 35.5 in 2008 and 29.2 in 2015, over the past eight years, the country has advanced on the GHI by only 0.5 points. The 2000, 2008 and 2015 GHI scores are the only data that can be used for valid comparisons over time.
India’s performance mirrors a global trend. The 2023 GHI score for the world is 18.3, which is considered moderate. However, it is only one point below the world’s 2015 GHI score of 19.1. Globally, the share of people who are undernourished, which is one of the indicators used in the index, actually rose from 7.5% in 2017 to 9.2% in 2022, reaching about 735 million.
The Ministry of Women and Child Development (MoWCD) yet again questioned the GHI and called it a “flawed measure of hunger that doesn’t reflect India’s true position”. It said that data recorded on its Poshan Tracker portal showed child wasting prevalence of 7.2% among a total of 7.24 crore under-five-year-olds whose data was captured, whereas the GHI used a value of 18.7% for child wasting. The latter, however, comes from the National Family Health Survey 5 (NFHS) 2019-2021, which is reported in the global repository, Joint Malnutrition Estimates Joint Data Set Including Survey Estimates, set up to ensure harmonised child nutrition estimates.
“The GHI uses the same data sources for all countries to calculate the respective country scores. This ensures that all the rates used have been produced using comparable methodologies. Introducing exceptions to this process for any country or countries would compromise the comparability of the results and the ranking,” Miriam Wiemers, senior policy advisor at the GHI, said.
The second objection the MoWCD reiterated this year was the alleged use of a telephone-based opinion poll to calculate undernourishment, one of the indicators used in GHI. The GHI has maintained that it doesn’t use the poll, but relies on data from India’s Food Balance Sheet to calculate undernourishment.
South Asia and Africa South of the Sahara are the world regions with the highest hunger levels, with GHI scores of 27.0 each, indicating serious hunger. West Asia and North Africa is the region with the third-highest hunger level with a score of 11.9 indicating “moderate” hunger level. Latin American and the Caribbean is the only region in the world whose GHI scores have worsened between 2015 and 2023.
East and Southeast Asia, dominated by populous China, has the second-lowest 2023 GHI score of any region in the report. China, for example, is among the top 20 countries that each have a GHI score of less than 5. The region with the lowest 2023 GHI score is Europe and Central Asia, whose score of 6.0 is considered “low”.
According to the GHI 2023 report, the stagnation in the fight against global hunger is largely due “to the combined effects of overlapping crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war, economic stagnation, the impacts of climate change, and the intractable conflicts facing many countries of the world.” It adds that the combination of these crises have led to a cost of living crisis and exhausted the coping capacity of many countries.
“The fourth and most important indicator ‘Proportion of Undernourished (PoU) population’ is based on an opinion poll conducted on a very small sample size of 3,000,” it said in the statement.
India has prioritised several key activities to address the challenge of malnutrition under Mission Saksham Anganwadi and Poshan 2.0 (Mission Poshan 2.0). The Ministry of Women and Child Development developed and deployed the ‘Poshan Tracker’ application as an important governance tool, the government said.
Several key international organizations such as UNICEF, WHO, and the World Bank have acknowledged the ‘Poshan Tracker’ as a game-changer in the area of nutrition. The World Bank and UNICEF have collaborated closely with the ministry to support the operationalisation of the ‘Poshan Tracker’, the government said.
“Since April 2023, the measurement data of children under 5 years uploaded on Poshan Tracker has consistently increased – from 6.34 crore in April 2023 to 7.24 crore in September 2023. The percentage of child wasting, as seen on the Poshan Tracker, has been consistently below 7.2 per cent, month-on-month, as compared to the value of 18.7 per cent used for child wasting in the Global Hunger Index 2023,” the government said.
Two other indicators – stunting and wasting – are outcomes of complex interactions of various other factors like sanitation, genetics, environment and utilisation of food intake apart from hunger which is taken as the causative or outcome factor for stunting and wasting in the GHI.
Also, there is hardly any evidence that the fourth indicator, namely, child mortality is an outcome of hunger, the government said. The centre launched the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY) with the specific purpose of ameliorating the hardships faced by the poor and needy due to economic disruptions caused by the COVID-19 outbreak in the country, it said.