- Wednesday, February 26, 2025
The country’s women and child development ministry said the index is an erroneous measure of hunger and suffers from serious methodological issues.
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE Indian government has rejected the 2023 Global Hunger Index (GHI) in which the country was given a low rank of 111, calling it a flawed measure of “hunger” that does not reflect the country’s true position.
The country’s women and child development ministry said the index suffers from “serious methodological issues and shows a malafide intent”.
India ranked 111th out of 125 countries in the Global Hunger Index-2023, released on Thursday (12), with the country reporting the highest child wasting rate at 18.7 per cent. In 2022, it was ranked 107th out of 121 countries.
India’s neighbours Pakistan (102th), Bangladesh (81st), Nepal (69th) and Sri Lanka (60th) have fared better in the index. South Asia and Africa South of the Sahara are the world regions with the highest hunger levels, with a GHI score of 27 each, indicating serious hunger.
The GHI is a tool for comprehensively measuring and tracking hunger at global, regional, and national levels.
Rejecting India’s ranking at the index, the women and child development ministry 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 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 added that since April 2023, the measurement data of children under five years uploaded on the Poshan (nutrition) 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 ministry said in a statement.
According to the index, the rate of undernourishment in India stood at 16.6 per cent and under-five mortality at 3.1 per cent. The ministry further said two other indicators, namely 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/outcome factor for stunting and wasting in the GHI.
Also, there is hardly any evidence that the fourth indicator — child mortality — is an outcome of hunger, it said.
(With PTI inputs)
