Hunger index

It is sad that India has ranked 107th out of 121 countries in the recently released report of the Global Hunger Index 2022, with alarm bells ringing over the fact that the country's child-wasting rate at 19.3 per cent has been marked the highest in the world. While the Global Hunger Index (GHI) is a tool for comprehensively measuring and tracking hunger at global, regional, and national levels, India's score of 29.1 has been described as "serious." The Global Hunger Report 2022 is released by Concern Worldwide and Welt Hunger Hilfe, two Non-Government Organizations from Ireland and Germany respectively. The GHI scores are based on the values of four component indicators, these being (i) Undernourishment (the share of the population with insufficient caloric intake), (ii) Child stunting (the share of children under age five who have low height for their age, reflecting chronic under-nutrition), (iii) Child wasting (the share of children under age five who have low weight for their height, reflecting acute under-nutrition), and (iv) Child mortality (the share of children who die before their fifth birthday, partly reflecting the fatal mix of inadequate nutrition and unhealthy environments). According to the report, India's position among the 121 countries list is even behind four neighbouring countries - Pakistan (99), Bangladesh (84), Nepal (81) and Sri Lanka (64), with Afghanistan (rank 109) being the only country from Asia which is behind India. The Government of India, however, has dismissed the Global Hunger Index report of 2022 by saying that the index is an erroneous measure of hunger and suffers from serious methodological issues. An official statement issued in Delhi also described it as part of a misinformation campaign which is part of consistent efforts by certain quarters to taint India's image as a Nation that does not fulfil the food security and nutritional requirements of its population. Criticizing the report, the official statement said that three out of the four indicators used for the calculation of the index were related to the health of children and cannot be representative of the entire population. The fourth and most important indicator – an estimate of the Proportion of the Undernourished (PoU) population – is based on an opinion poll conducted on a very small sample size of 3000, the government has said. It has also dismissed the report by saying that calculating hunger based mainly on indicators relating to the health indicators of children is neither scientific nor rational.