Global Hunger Index 2022 & India's ranking - A Digest

A news that cannot be digested though. The recently released GHI survey has given fodder on a platter to Modi baiters. There are discussions, debates going on this and let me join the same. 

India has ranked 107th out of 121 countries in the Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2022, down from the 101st position the previous year. Jointly published by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerlife, the GHI lists countries by ‘severity’. Yemen has ranked in the lowest position at 121, while the top of the list is dominated by European nations including Croatia, Estonia and Montenegro. Among Asian nations, China and Kuwait have ranked the highest. What is the Global Hunger Index? The GHI has been brought out almost every year since 2000; with this year’s report being the 15th one. A low score gets a country a higher ranking and implies a better performance. 

The reason for mapping hunger is to ensure that the world achieves “Zero Hunger by 2030” — one of the Sustainable Development Goals laid out by the United Nations. It is for this reason that GHI scores are not calculated for certain high-income countries. While in common parlance hunger is understood in terms of food deprivation, in a formal sense it is calculated by mapping the level of caloric intake. However, the GHI does not limit itself to this narrow definition of hunger. Instead, it tracks the performance of different countries on four key parameters because, taken together, these parameters capture multiple dimensions — such a deficiency of micronutrients — of hunger, thus providing a far more comprehensive measure of hunger. For more details on this visit this site: https://www.globalhungerindex.org/methodology.html 

How is hunger measured? 

The GHI looks at four main indicators: 

• Undernourishment (which reflects inadequate food availability): calculated by the share of the population that is undernourished (that is, whose caloric intake is insufficient); 
• Child Wasting (which reflects acute undernutrition): calculated by the share of children under the age of five who are wasted (that is, those who have low weight for their height) 
• Child Stunting (which reflects chronic undernutrition): calculated by the share of children under the age of five who are stunted (that is, those who have low height for their age); 
• Child Mortality (which reflects both inadequate nutrition and unhealthy environment): calculated by the mortality rate of children under the age of five (in part, a reflection of the fatal mix of inadequate nutrition

Each country’s data are standardised on a 100-point scale and a final score is calculated after giving 33.33% weight each to components 1 and 4 and giving 16.66% weight each to components 2 and 3. Countries scoring less than or equal to 9.9 are slotted in the “low” category of hunger, while those scoring between 20 and 34.9 are in the “serious” category and those scoring above 50 are in the “extremely alarming” category. 

What is India’s score relative to those of the others? 

With a score of 29.1, which falls in the ‘serious’ category of hunger, India was ranked behind its neighbours Nepal (81), Pakistan (99), Sri Lanka (64), and Bangladesh (84). India has been recording decreasing GHI scores over the years. In 2000, it recorded an ‘alarming’ score of 38.8, which reduced to 28.2 by 2014. The country has started recording higher scores since then. While India has been consistently recording lower values for the four indicators, it started going up in 2014 for undernourishment and the prevalence of wasting in children. The proportion of undernourishment in the population went from 14.8 in 2014 to 16.3 in 2022, and the prevalence of wasting in children under five years jumped from 15.1 in 2014 to 19.3 in 2022. The authors of the Global Hunger Index (GHI), released on October 15, write that “the level of hunger in India is serious”. The country is ranked 107 of the 121 countries they studied. With a score of 29.1 (0 means no hunger), India is behind its South Asian neighbours — Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. 

Close to 20% of children in the country below the age of five suffer from the most visible and life-threatening form of malnutrition — wasting, or “low weight-for-height”. About 35% of such children are not as tall as they should be. These sobering factoids could have served as inputs for government programmes such as Poshan 2.0 and the Mid-Day Meal scheme. However — like last year — the Ministry of Women and Child Development not only dismissed the GHI but also questioned the intent of its authors. 

An official statement has described the report as part of a “consistent effort’’ to “taint India’s image”. Part of the government’s critique pertains to one of the major takeaways of the GHI — the pandemic seems to have aggravated India’s malnutrition crisis. It contends that the report ignores the food security efforts undertaken during the crisis, especially the provision of 5 kg food grain to all beneficiaries of the National Food Security Act in addition to their regular ration. There can be little doubt about the efficacy of the PDS as a safety net during troubled times. 

However, as several scholars have pointed out, the nutrition deficit of the country’s children is, in large measure, a function of their poor diets. Studies have shown that even the well-off in the country do not consume adequate amounts of fruits, vegetables and non-cereal proteins. Eggs do not figure in the Mid-Day Meal schemes in a majority of states. 

It is a known fact that Indian food lacks essential nutrients of late. If we blamed our agriculturalists for this, we will be pounced for being anti-national. The farmers are repeatedly harvesting the cash-crops like Rice and Wheat that makes the soil tired. Crop-rotation is a long forgotten thing in Indian agriculture. Millets is another forgotten crop by the Indian farmers. All they want is less work and dump the good irrespective of market demand. Result, the produce lacks the nutrients. This is getting reflected badly inform of health. The government has argued that the index relied on an opinion poll. The authors of the report have clarified that the GHI draws on data reported by member countries, including India. The debate on methodology isn’t settled and such conversations could enrich the understanding of a longstanding predicament faced by the country — one that the National Family Health Surveys have long underscored. The NFHS-5, conducted just before the pandemic, showed that more than 20% of children below the age of five did not weigh as much as they should. The discourse on nutrition could acquire greater nuance with more data — on household consumption of food items, for instance. But the country has not had any official estimate on per capita household spending since 2011-12 — the findings of the last survey in 2017-18 were rejected by the government on “data quality” issues. Work on filling this vacuum has, reportedly, begun. The government would be well-advised to bolster its information repositories that can help it address malnutrition effectively, and not be prickly about GHI rankings. 

The Govt should take this as a constructive criticsm and prove the world that these numbers are not real. While one can endlessly debate on the methodology, the Govt should come out with schemes that will help us improve the caloric value of the diets we have and the nutrient supplements are provided right. If this means radical changes in agricultural needs, let us do it. One such effort was thwarted in the recent past, courtesy, lack of guts by the Central Govt. Its time Govt stopped whining and blaming GHI but took some constructive measures to reverse this trend.