India Fares Poorly in Global Hunger Index 17th Oct, 2020

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• India ranks 94th among 107 countries in terms of hunger, and continues to be in the ‘severe’ hunger category according to the Global Hunger Index 2020 report released on 16 th October, 2020. According to the study, 14% of India’s population is undernourished. The Index, which was released on Friday, is a peer-reviewed report released annually by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe.

About

• Last year India ranked 102 out of 117 countries. According to the findings of GHI, South Asia and Africa South of the Sahara have the worst hunger conditions among global regions.
• India ranks lower than most of its South Asian neighbors – Pakistan (88), Nepal (73), Bangladesh (75), Sri Lanka (64) and Myanmar (78) – and only Afghanistan fares worse, at 99th place. The statistics for Bhutan are not available.
• India has the highest prevalence of wasted children less than five years in the world, which reflects acute under nutrition. The situation has worsened in the 2015-19 period, when the prevalence of child wasting was 17.3%, in comparison to 2010-14, when it was 15.1%.
• It uses four parameters to determine its scores. India fares worst in child wasting (low weight for height, reflecting acute under nutrition) and child stunting (low height for age, reflecting chronic under nutrition), which together make up a third of the total score.
• Although it is still in the poorest category, however, child stunting has actually improved significantly, from 54% in 2000 to less than 35% now. Child wasting, on the other hand, has not improved in the last two decades, and is rather worse than it was decade ago.
• India has improved in both child mortality rates, which are now at 3.7%, and in terms of undernourishment, with about 14% of the total population which gets an insufficient caloric intake.
• In the region of south, east and south-eastern Asia, the only countries which fare worse than India are Timor-Leste, Afghanistan and North Korea.

Impact of COVID

• The report says that COVID pandemic could have affected the progress made on reducing hunger and poverty. According to the report, the world is not on track to achieve the second Sustainable Development Goal — known as Zero Hunger for short — by 2030. At the current pace, approximately 37 countries will fail even to reach low hunger, as defined by the Global Hunger Index Severity Scale, by 2030.

GLOBAL HUNGER INDEX

Created in 2006, the GHI was initially published by the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Germany-based Welthungerhilfe . In 2007, the Irish NGO Concern Worldwide also became a co-publisher. In 2018, IFPRI stepped aside from its involvement in the project and the GHI became a joint project of Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide.

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is a tool for comprehensively measuring and tracking hunger at global, regional, and national levels. GHI scores are based on the values of four component indicators:

• Undernourishment (share of the population with insufficient caloric intake);
• Child wasting (share of children under age five who have low weight for their height, reflecting acute under nutrition);
• Child stunting (share of children under age five who have low height for their age, reflecting chronic under nutrition);
• Child mortality (mortality rate of children under age five, partly reflecting the fatal mix of inadequate nutrition and unhealthy environments).

Based on the values of the four indicators, the GHI determines hunger on a 100-point scale where 0 is the best possible score (no hunger) and 100 is the worst. Each country’s GHI score is classified by severity, from low to extremely alarming.