Context:
India ranks 107 out of 121 countries on the Global Hunger Index in which it fares worse than all countries in South Asia barring war-torn Afghanistan.
Relevance:
GS-II: Social Justice and Governance (Issues related to Hunger and Poverty, Government Policies and Interventions)
Dimensions of the Article:
- About Global Hunger Index (GHI)
- Highlights of the Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2022
About Global Hunger Index (GHI)
- The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is a tool that measures and tracks hunger globally as well as by region and by country.
- The Global Hunger Index (GHI) prepared by European NGOs of Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe.
- The GHI combines 4 component indicators:
- Undernourishment: the share of the population with insufficient caloric intake (data are from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization)
- Child stunting: the share of children under age five who have low height for their age (data are from UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the Demographic and Health Surveys Program)
- Child wasting: the share of children under age five who have low weight for their height (data are from UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the Demographic and Health Surveys Program)
- Child mortality: the mortality rate of children under age five (data are from the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation).
- Countries are divided into five categories of hunger on the basis of their score, which are ‘low’, ‘moderate’, ‘serious’, ‘alarming’ and ‘extremely alarming’.
- The GHI is calculated annually, and its results appear in a report issued in October each year.
- Besides presenting GHI scores, each year the GHI report includes an essay addressing one particular aspect of hunger.
- The aim of the Global Hunger Index is to raise awareness and act against hunger to reduce hunger around the world.
Highlights of the Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2022
- India’s score of 29.1 places it in the ‘serious’ category.
- India also ranks below Sri Lanka (64), Nepal (81), Bangladesh (84), and Pakistan (99). Afghanistan (109) is the only country in South Asia that performs worse than India on the index.
- China is among the countries collectively ranked between 1 and 17 having a score of less than five.
- India’s child wasting rate (low weight for height), at 19.3%, is worse than the levels recorded in 2014 (15.1%) and even 2000 (17.15), and is the highest for any country in the world and drives up the region’s average owing to India’s large population.
- Prevalence of undernourishment, which is a measure of the proportion of the population facing chronic deficiency of dietary energy intake, has also risen in the country from 14.6% in 2018-2020 to 16.3% in 2019-2021.
- This translates into 224.3 million people in India considered undernourished.
- But India has shown improvement in child stunting, which has declined from 38.7% to 35.5% between 2014 and 2022, as well as child mortality which has also dropped from 4.6% to 3.3% in the same comparative period.
- On the whole, India has shown a slight worsening with its GHI score increasing from 28.2 in 2014 to 29.1 in 2022.
-Source: The Hindu
