How's the Global Hunger Index calculated? Why has India called it ‘erroneous’?

The Global Hunger Index for 2023 has been released, with India slipping four ranks. The government on Thursday rejected the global index, which places India 111th out of 125 nations, for the third time in three years. India has a score of 28.7 on the index, published yesterday, indicating a severe level of hunger. The country came in behind neighbouring country Pakistan (102nd). Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka all rank in the top 100. The country, however, performed better than South Asia and Africa South of the Sahara both had a score of 27. The Global Hunger Index The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is a peer-reviewed annual report that tries to “comprehensively measure and track hunger at the global, regional, and country levels.” It is jointly published by Concern Worldwide, an Ireland-based non-profit organisation, and Germany’s Welt Hunger Hilfe. The report is prepared with the Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG 2), which calls for “Zero Hunger” by 2030, in mind. It aims to “raise awareness and understanding of the struggle against hunger.” A country that performs better is ranked higher, indicating that it has a lower index score. The calculation While we typically relate hunger with a lack of access to food, in mathematics, hunger is actually determined by calculating calorie intake. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the report captures three aspects of hunger: a lack of food availability, deficiencies in children’s nutritional status, and child mortality (which is, in large part, caused by undernutrition). As a result, the index includes three equally weighted indicators: the percentage of people who are food energy-deficient, as calculated by the FAO; the prevalence of underweight in children under the age of five, as compiled by the WHO; and the mortality rate of children under the age of five, as reported by UNICEF. To determine which countries are significantly better or worse off in terms of hunger and undernutrition than would be predicted by their GNI per capita, a regression analysis of the global hunger index on GNI per capita is conducted. The highest and worst potential scores for each country are 0 and 100, respectively, on a scale of 100. The “low” group includes nations with scores of 9.9 or less, while the “serious” category includes nations with scores of 20–34.9. The category “extremely alarming” includes countries with scores over 50. India slips four places this time India received a 28.7 score, which indicates a severe level of hunger. The prevalence of anaemia in women between the ages of 15 and 24 was 58.1 per cent, compared to India’s 16.6 per cent undernourishment rate, which went from 14.8 in 2014, and three per cent under-five mortality rate. According to the ranking, the country also has the world’s highest child-wasting rate (18.7 per cent), which reflects severe undernutrition.

In the GHI’s 2022 edition, India ranked 107th out of 121 nations with a score of 29.1. It also had the highest child-wasting rate in the world, with 19.3 per cent. The Asian country was placed 94th in 2020 and 101st out of 116 nations in 2021, respectively. With a score of 38.8 in 2000, India was in the “alarming category” and has since improved. In 2014, the number fell to 28.2, placing India in the “serious” category. But since then, India has not been able to advance. After many years of improvement up to 2015, the 2023 Global Hunger Index (GHI) concludes that progress against hunger around the world has essentially come to a standstill. The global GHI score for 2023 is 18.3, which is considered moderate and is only 0.1 points lower than the global GHI score of 19.1 for 2015. In addition, the prevalence of undernourishment, one of the factors used to determine GHI scores, has increased since 2017, and the estimated number of undernourished persons has increased from 572 million to around 735 million. According to the GHI, the combined effects of the worldwide pandemic, recessions, wars, and the Russia-Ukraine war have increased social and economic disparities and hindered or reversed past progress in many nations’ efforts to reduce hunger. Government rejects the report The government said in a statement today that the Global Hunger Index is still an erroneous indicator of “hunger” and fails to accurately represent India’s situation. “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,” the Women and Child Development Ministry said in a statement. Under Mission Saksham Anganwadi and Poshan 2.0 (Mission Poshan 2.0), India has prioritised a number of crucial initiatives to address the problem of malnutrition. According to the government, the ‘Poshan Tracker’ application was launched by the Ministry of Women and Child Development as a vital governance tool. The tracker has been hailed as a game-changer in the field of nutrition by a number of significant international organisations, including UNICEF, WHO, and the World Bank. The ministry has worked closely with the World Bank and UNICEF to promote the operationalisation of the Poshan Tracker, it added. According to the ministry, since April 2023, the number of measurement data for children under the age of five that have been uploaded to the Poshan Tracker has steadily climbed, rising 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. The ministry added that, besides hunger, which is viewed as the cause factor for stunting and wasting in the GHI, these two indicators are also the result of complex interactions of numerous other factors, like sanitation, genetics, environment, and how food is used. The fourth measure, child mortality, has no evidence to support its link to hunger, it added. Notably, the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY) was established by the centre specifically to ease the suffering of the poor and needy as a result of the country’s economic setbacks brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Criticism from Opposition parties Kerala’s Congress unit, taking to X, taking a dig at the BJP, said, “The emperor is having a feast while his people starve.”

Rashtriya Janata Dal supremo Lalu Prasad reacted to the report, by saying, “Now the Modi government at the Center will habitually call the report and index false and flawed instead of understanding and accepting the report and improving its policies.”

Rajya Sabha MP and All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Saket Gokhale slammed the BJP-led government by saying the “Modi government is in denial mode.” He said, “Modi Govt, as always, is in denial mode because Modi needs to be promoted as “vishwaguru”. We’re spending 4100 crores on G20 & 21,000 crores on 1 convention center in Delhi while millions of Indians starve & go hungry everyday. TV news channels will keep talking about Israel but will conveniently ignore this. Modi’s PR that hides the poor behind green curtains & denies even the existence of hungry Indians shows how the man cares about nothing beyond himself.”

  Best and worst performers China and Belarus, along with Chile, Kuwait, Estonia, Georgia, Croatia, Hungary, and others, rank highly (with a score of 5). The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar, the Central African Republic, Somalia, Burundi, and South Sudan, which are in the “alarming” category, are some of the countries that perform the worst. No nation has reported an extremely alarming level of hunger. With inputs from agencies