Hunger rising in India, but Delhi challenges findings
India’s rank in the Global Hunger Index worsened from last year's 107th place out of 125 countries, coming in last for child wasting. Only countries like Mozambique, Afghanistan, Haiti, Yemen, South Sudan and Somalia are worse than India. The Indian government, however, has dismissed the findings, arguing that the GHI report is methodologically flawed.
New Delhi (AsiaNews) – India ranked 111th out of 125 countries in the 2023 Global Hunger Index (GHI), down four places over last year.
“With a score of 28.7 in the 2023 Global Hunger Index (GHI), India has a level of hunger that is serious," reads the global report released by Concern Worldwide and Welt Hunger Hilfe, NGOs based in Ireland and Germany respectively.
In 2022, India – which became the most populous country in the world a few months ago overtaking China – was ranked 107th.
In a statement, the Indian Ministry of Women and Child Development dismissed the index, saying that it “continues to be a flawed measure of ‘Hunger’ and does not reflect India’s true position.”
The GHI report placed Pakistan in 102nd place, Bangladesh in 81st, Nepal in 69th, and Sri Lanka in 60th place.
In the past few years, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa have been the regions with the highest levels of hunger.
The index uses a 100-point scale with 0 as the best score indicating no hunger, and looks at four indicators to reach its results: undernourishment, child mortality, child wasting, and child stunting.
One of the report’s most alarming findings is the level of child wasting, with India in last place at 18.7 per cent; this means that almost one in Indian under the age of 18 is seriously malnourished.
India’s rate of undernourishment stood at 16.6 per cent and under-five mortality at 3.1 per cent. The report also found that anaemia affected 58.1 per cent of women aged between 15 and 24 years.
The Indian government has rejected the GHI report. "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," said the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development in a statement.
“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.
For the ministry, "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”.
Yet, for Miriam Wiemers, senior policy advisor at the Global Hunger Index, the calculations for undernourishment were not based on its polls but on data from India’s own Food Balance Sheet.
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21/10/2021 14:54
