Editorial: Hunger Republic

Empty stomachs and malnutrition lead to health and economic fallouts. The latest Global Hunger Index (GHI) has painted India in a poor light. Prepared by European NGOs, the GHI 2022 has shown that the country has slipped further to the 107th position out of 121 countries from last year’s rank of 101. What is more […]

Empty stomachs and malnutrition lead to health and economic fallouts. The latest Global Hunger Index (GHI) has painted India in a poor light. Prepared by European NGOs, the GHI 2022 has shown that the country has slipped further to the 107th position out of 121 countries from last year’s rank of 101. What is more ignominious is that the country is behind Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. Last year, too, when its rank had fallen as compared to that in 2020, India slammed the report, saying that the basis of calculating the findings — prepared by Irish aid agency Concern Worldwide and German organisation Welt Hunger Hilfe — was divorced from the ground reality and that the methodology used was unscientific. Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee, too, was reported to have said that India should not take the drop in its ranking seriously as the methodology used for the exercise was ‘model-based’ and not survey-based. India’s main objection is that three out of the four indicators used for the calculation of the index are related to the health of children and cannot be representative of the entire population. But, GHI claims that it uses the data presented by India to the United Nations to measure the proportion of undernourishment in children under five through the indicators of undernourishment, child wasting, child stunting and child mortality. However, even if the Hunger Index is dismissed for its flawed metrics and faulty methodologies, we cannot shut our eyes to the prevalence of the scourge of hunger and the challenges in the fight to eradicate it, as revealed by other surveys.

India’s performance on the UN Sustainable Development Goals that mandate zero hunger by 2030 is dismal. Even the domestic family health surveys do not project a rosy picture. The situation warrants strong remedial measures and a relook at the current policies. Though agriculture production in the country has risen by six times since Independence, storage, distribution and wastage issues hamper the optimal use of foodgrains. Well-meaning schemes over the years are riddled with graft and leaks, preventing the food from reaching the needy beneficiaries. India has been recording decreasing GHI scores over the years. With a score of 29.1, which falls in the ‘serious’ category of hunger, India was ranked behind its neighbours Nepal (81), Pakistan (99), Sri Lanka (64), and Bangladesh (84) this time. As per the index, 44 countries have serious or ‘alarming’ hunger levels. Globally, the progress against hunger has largely stagnated in recent years, with a global score of 18.2 in 2022, compared with 19.1 in 2014. The plausible causes for the stagnation are overlapping crises such as conflicts among countries, climate change, economic fallout of the pandemic as well as the Russia-Ukraine war, which has increased global food, fuel, and fertilizer prices and is expected to worsen hunger in 2023 and beyond.