‘Biased, erroneous’: Centre rejects hunger index report
In 2021, India was ranked 101 among 116 countries by the hunger index. Since the total number of countries evaluated between the previous year and 2022 vary and there are some differences in the source data, India’s rankings for 2022 and 2021 aren’t comparable, the GHI 2022 said.
The Indian government on Saturday sharply criticised the Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2022 that ranked the country 107 among 121 nations, saying that the annual report was “biased and disconnected from ground reality”.
With a score of 29.1 -- a value denoting a serious level of hunger -- India ranks behind neighbours Sri Lanka (64), Nepal (81), Bangladesh (84) and Pakistan (99) on GHI 2022, a peer-reviewed report published by global non-profits Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe. The index catalogues five levels of hunger: low, moderate, serious, alarming and extremely alarming.
“A consistent effort is yet again visible to taint India’s image as a nation that does not fulfil the food security and nutritional requirements of its population,” the women and child development ministry said in a statement. “Misinformation seems to be the hallmark of the annually released Global Hunger Index,” the women and child development ministry said in a statement.
GHI scores are computed on the values of four indicators: undernourishment, child stunting, child wasting and child mortality, according to the report.
Stunting refers to the share of children under age five with low height for age, while wasting denotes low weight for height, reflecting chronic poor nutrition. India’s child wasting rate of 19.3% was the “highest of any country”, the GHI 2022 said.
The government has questioned the GHI’s methodology, as it did last year. “The index is an erroneous measure of hunger and suffers from serious methodological issues,” it said.
“Three out of the four indicators used for calculation of the index are related to health of children and cannot be representative of the entire population,” the ministry said. “The fourth and most important indicator estimate of Proportion of Undernourished (PoU) population is based on an opinion poll conducted on a very small sample size of 3,000.”
In 2021, India was ranked 101 among 116 countries by the hunger index. Since the total number of countries evaluated between the previous year and 2022 vary and there are some differences in the source data, India’s rankings for 2022 and 2021 aren’t comparable, the GHI 2022 said.
“It is important to note that Global Hunger Index scores, rankings and indicator values are comparable only within each year’s report, not between different years’ reports, owing to revisions of the source data and methodology,” the report said.
To enable statistically consistent tracking of a country’s performance over time, each report includes GHI scores and indicator data for three specified reference years. India’s 2022 GHI score “can be directly compared” with its GHI scores for 2000, 2007 and 2014, the 2022 report said.
In 2014, India’s hunger score was 28.2, compared to 29.1 this year. This marks a worsening of the country’s hunger crisis between 2014 and 2022, since greater the hunger score, poorer the performance of a country.
Despite high growth and an expanding economy leaping past the UK’s to become the world’s fifth largest, India has been found wanting on nutritional outcomes and human development parameters, such as education and health, by global surveys, including the UN’s Human Development Index 2021 published in August.
“Our progress on nutrition, health and education is slow because we have not paid attention,” said economist Himanshu of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, who goes by one name. “Headline numbers such as GDP gets more attention and human development has not become a political issue.”
On the hunger index’s persistent findings of poor nutrition levels in India, the government in December last year had said: “The report completely disregarded the government’s economic response to Covid-19 of providing free foodgrains to 80 crore (800 million) people under the National Food Security Act.”
The GHI 2022 report takes a “one-dimensional view”, the government said on Saturday. The report lowers India’s rank based on the estimate of proportion of undernourished population for India at 16.3%, derived from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) survey module.
Data collected by GHI from a “minuscule sample for a country of India’s size” through a telephonic opinion poll by Gallup, a US survey firm, and using the FIES to compute the proportion of undernourished is not only “wrong and unethical”, but it also “reeks of obvious bias”, the government said.
The global hunger situation is likely to worsen due to overlapping global crises, such as the Ukraine war, climate change and the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, the GHI report published on Friday said.
According to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 2019-21, the latest and 5th in the series, anaemia among children under five has worsened, with prevalence of nearly 67.1% compared to 58.6% recorded in the NFHS’s 4th round, while 57% of women of reproductive age are anaemic.
Senior AAP leader and Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia took a dig at the Centre over the index. “The BJP people give speeches of making India a 5 trillion economy but we are at 107th place in the Hunger Index... 106 countries including Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh are better than us in providing two square meals.”