Global Hunger Index 2023: New Delhi has rejected the Global Hunger Index 2023 calling it a flawed measure of “hunger” that does not reflect India’s true position after India was ranked 111th out of 125 countries.
The government called it erroneous, and the Women and Child Development Ministry said the index suffers from “serious methodological issues and shows a malafide intent”.
“The index is an erroneous measure of hunger and suffers from serious methodological issues. Three out of the four indicators used for the 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 said.
The ministry said that since April 2023, the measurement data of children under five years uploaded on the Poshan 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. Also, there is hardly any evidence that the fourth indicator — child mortality — is an outcome of hunger, it said.
The index, released on Thursday, also stated that India has the highest child-wasting rate in the world at 18.7 per cent, reflecting acute undernutrition. India ranked 107th out of 121 countries in the 2022 edition of the Global Hunger Index (GHI), a tool for comprehensively measuring and tracking hunger at global, regional, and national levels.
With a score of 28.7 in the Global Hunger Index-2023, India has a level of hunger that is serious, according to a report based on the index. India’s neighbouring countries Pakistan (102nd), Bangladesh (81st), Nepal (69th) and Sri Lanka (60th) have fared better than it in the index. “India has the highest child wasting rate in the world, at 18.7 per cent, reflecting acute undernutrition,” the report based on the index stated. 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 2023 Global Hunger Index (GHI) shows that, after many years of advancement up to 2015, progress against hunger worldwide remains largely at a standstill. The 2023 GHI score for the world is 18.3, considered moderate and less than one point below the world’s 2015 GHI score of 19.1.
