Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Oct 15: The Central government has quickly dismissed the “Global Hunger Index 2022” report that placed India 107 out of 121 countries, even far below the other Asian countries like Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh, except Afghanistan which was ranked 109. China is among the countries collectively ranked between 1 and 17 having a score of less than five.
As soon as the report was out on Saturday, the union ministry of women and child development, in a statement, 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 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 minister said in the statement.
“A consistent effort is yet again visible to taint India’s image as a Nation that does not fulfill the food security and nutritional requirements of its population. Misinformation seems to be the hallmark of the annually released Global Hunger Index,” it added.
The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is a tool for comprehensively measuring and tracking hunger at global, regional, and national levels. GHI scores are based on the values of four component 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.
India’s score of 29.1 places it in the ‘serious’ category. India’s child wasting rate (low weight for height), at 19.3%, is worse than the levels recorded in 2014 (15.1%) and even 2000 (17.15%), and is the highest for any country in the world and drives up the region’s average owing to India’s large population. 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. In 2021, India ranked 101 out of 116 countries while in 2020 the country was placed at 94th position.
South Asia, the region with the world’s highest hunger level, has the highest child stunting rate and by far the highest child wasting rate in the world, the report said.
“India’s child wasting rate, at 19.3 per cent, is the highest of any country in the world and drives up the region’s average owing to India’s large population,” it said.
Prevalence of undernourishment, which is a measure of the proportion of the population facing chronic deficiency of dietary energy intake, has also risen in the country from 14.6% in 2018-2020 to 16.3% in 2019-2021. This translates into 224.3 million people in India considered undernourished out of the total 828 million people undernourished globally. India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan each have child stunting rates between 35 and 38 per cent, with Afghanistan’s rate being the highest in the region.
India has shown improvement in the other two indicators – child stunting has declined from 38.7% to 35.5% between 2014 and 2022 and child mortality has also dropped from 4.6% to 3.3% in the same comparative period. On the whole, India has shown a slight worsening with its GHI score increasing from 28.2 in 2014 to 29.1 in 2022.
But the centre claimed the report was not only disconnected from ground reality but also chooses to deliberately ignore efforts made by the Narendra Modi government to ensure food security for the population, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Taking a one-dimensional view, the report lowers India’s rank based on the estimate of Proportion of Undernourished (PoU) population for India at 16.3%. The FAO estimate is based on ‘Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES)’ Survey Module conducted through Gallop World Poll, which is an ‘opinion poll’ based on ‘8 questions’ with a sample size of ‘3000 respondents’. The data collected from a miniscule sample for a country of India’s size through FIES has been used to compute PoU value for India which is not only wrong & unethical, it also reeks of obvious bias. The publishing agencies of the Global Hunger Report, Concern Worldwide and Welt Hunger Hilfe, have evidently not done their due diligence before releasing the report,” it said.
Though the GHI is an annual report, the rankings are not comparable across different years. The GHI score for 2022 can only be compared with scores for 2000, 2007 and 2014.
Globally, progress against hunger has largely stagnated in recent years. The 2022 GHI score for the world is considered “moderate”, but 18.2 in 2022 is only a slight improvement from 19.1 in 2014. This is due to overlapping crises such as conflict, climate change, the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic as well as Ukraine war which has increased global food, fuel, and fertiliser prices and is expected to “worsen hunger in 2023 and beyond.”
There are 44 countries that currently have “serious” or “alarming” hunger levels and “without a major shift, neither the world as a whole nor approximately 46 countries are projected to achieve even low hunger as measured by the GHI by 2030,” notes the report.
Laura Reiner, Senior Policy Officer Global Hunger Index, in an e-mailed response explains why the GHI scores can’t be compared with last year’s scores. She writes, “Each set of GHI scores uses data from a 5-year period. The 2022 GHI scores are calculated using data from 2017 through 2021; the 2014 GHI scores are calculated using data from 2012 through 2016. the 2007 GHI scores are calculated using data from 2005 through 2009, and the 2000 scores are calculated using data from 1998 through 2002. In order to show progress over time, we select past reference years such that the data used for the calculations do not come from overlapping years.”
Activists and politicians have hit out the government for India’s ranking. Sitaram Yechury, secretary-general of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) said the government must take responsibility for this era of darkness India has been brought to in 8.5 years.