India Slips to 107th Rank from 101st on 2022 Global Hunger Index

India ranks below Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan on the 2022 Global Hunger Index (GHI) with a dismal ranking of 107 out of 121 countries.

India’s rank, which dropped further from 101 out of 116 countries in 2021, is worse than all nations in South Asia— Sri Lanka (64), Nepal (81), Bangladesh (84), and Pakistan (99)—except Afghanistan (109).

Seventeen countries, including China, Turkey, Kuwait, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia and Estonia, shared the top rank with a GHI score of less than five.

The GHI is a peer-reviewed annual report jointly published by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe (WHL) designed to comprehensively measure and track hunger at the global, regional and country levels.

The GHI score is calculated on a 100-point scale that shows undernourishment; child wasting (the share of children under age five who have low weight for their height, reflecting acute undernutrition); child stunting (children under the age of five who have low height for their age, reflecting chronic undernutrition); and child mortality (the mortality rate of children under the age of five).

According to the rankings, zero is the best score (no hunger) and 100 is the worst. A score less than 9.9 is ‘low’, 10-19.9 ‘moderate’, 20-34.9 ‘serious’, 35-49.9 ‘alarming’, and above 50 ‘extremely alarming’.

India’s 2022 score of 29.1 places it in the ‘serious’ category. India’s GHI score has been continuously decreasing since 2000—from 38.8 to between 28.2 and 29.1 in 2014-2022.

China is among the countries collectively ranked between 1 and 17 having a score of less than five.

India’s child wasting rate at 19.3%, is worse than in 2014 (15.1%) and even 2000 (17.15%) and is the highest for any country in the world. Undernourishment has spiked as well from 14.6% in 2018-2020 to 16.3% in 2019-2021—224.3 million people in India are undernourished out of total of 828 million people undernourished globally.

Tweeting an image of The Hindu report on India’s poor ranking, Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Sitaram Yechury posted: “Dangerous, sharp slide of India on global hunger index since 2014. Modi govt is disastrous for India. Low food stocks barely over minimum buffer + 🔺prices. Govt must take responsibility for this era of darkness India has been brought to in 8.5 years. Enough of PR, spin & lies.”

Rajya Sabha member and former Union finance minister P Chidambaram tweeted: “When will the Hon’ble PM address real issues like malnutrition, hunger, and stunting and wasting among children? 22.4 crore people in India are considered undernourished. India’s rank in the Global Hunger Index is near the bottom—107 out of 121 countries.”

Chidambaram’s son and Lok Sabha member Karti Chidambaram tweeted: “The BJP government will reject this & raid the organisation which conducted the study.”

Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia tweeted that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) gives speeches about creating a $5 trillion economy but 106 countries are “better than us in providing two meals a day”.

India improved in child stunting from 38.7% to 35.5% between 2014 and 2022 and child mortality from 4.6% to 3.3%.

The Narendra Modi government had criticised last year’s report as “shocking” and “devoid of ground reality” alleging that the methodology used to calculate the GHI was “unscientific”.

“It is shocking to find that the Global Hunger Report 2021 has lowered the rank of India on the basis of FAO (UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation) estimate on proportion of undernourished population, which is found to be devoid of ground reality and facts and suffers from serious methodological issues. The publishing agencies of the Global Hunger Report,” the Centre had said in a statement.

Terming the methodology “unscientific”, the government further said, “They have based their assessment on the results of a four-question opinion poll which was conducted telephonically by Gallup. There is no scientific methodology to measure undernourishment like availability of food grains per capita during the period.”

Refuting the Centre’s allegations in an email sent to NDTV, WHL wrote that instead of using the Gallup opinion poll, undernourishment was measured using data officially presented by India to the UN.

“Global Hunger Index uses only a prevalence of undernourishment’ indicator ... obtained through carefully constructed food balance sheets which are primarily based on data officially reported by the member countries. including India,” Miriam Weimers, advisor, GHI, had said.