Current Affairs 2021: India's Rank in Global Hunger Index 2021

By Ankita Rawat

The Global Hunger Index 2021 was released recently. Read here the highlights of the Global Hunger Index 2021

The Global Hunger Index was first generated in October 2006 by Concern Worldwide and Wethungerilfe. The 2021 report is the 16th edition of GHI. The aim of GHI is to measure and track hunger at the regional, country, and global levels. The Global Hunger Index is calculated on the basis of four indicators including child wasting, undernourishment, child mortality, and child stunting. Depending upon these four indicators, the GHI decides hunger on a 100-point scale in which is '0' considered as the best score that indicates no hunger and 100 indicates the worst score.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation provides undernourishment data and the UN inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation provides child mortality data. The UNICEF, World Health Organization, and the World Bank provide the data for stunting and Child wasting. Food systems in conflict-ridden countries are marred by high levels of informality and structural weakness. It is vulnerable to shocks.

Globally, based on current Global Hunger Index results, the world – especially 47 countries to be specific – will fail to accomplish a low level of hunger by 2030. According to 2021 GHI reports, Somalia has been ranked the country with the highest level of hunger. Its GHI score is 50.08 is deemed to be extremely alarming. Somalia is headed by five countries including the Central African Republic, Madagascar, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Yemen, along with 31 other countries that have extremely serious levels of hunger. In 2021, the GHI score has shown that global hunger has been declined as compared to 2000.

The Global Hunger Index fell 4.7 points from 25.1 to 20.4, in between 2006 and 2012, it has declined only 2.5 points since 2012. The GHI that tracks malnutrition, hunger showed that 18 countries including Brazil, Kuwait, and China shared high-level rank with GHI scores of not more than five. The 2021 GHI report shows that the level of hunger in India is considered as alarming.

How did India perform in the past year?

India ranked 101 positions out of 116 countries. India is also included in 31 countries where hunger is considered a serious issue. In 2020, India has ranked 91 out of 107 countries in the GHI report. Moreover, India has placed behind a few neighbouring countries including Nepal at 75, Bangladesh at 76, and Pakistan at 92.

According to report, despite showing improvement in indicators like under-5 mortality rate, the prevalence of undernourishment due to inadequate food, and the prevalence of stunting among children has remained high. The worsening conflict, global climate change, economic and health challenges related to Covid 19 pandemic are also the main reasons for driving hunger. The three Cs -COVID-19, Conflicts, and Climate change have made it difficult to stay positive in 2021 towards progress against hunger in recent year.

The POSHAN Abhiyaan launched in 2017 to improve nutrition among pregnant women, children, lactating mothers has been weakened because of poor funding that resulted from smart clubbing with different schemes within the health budget and worse implementation. Only 0.57% of the current budget is allocated towards funding the POSHAN scheme and for child nutrition, the amount has been dropped by a huge 18.5% compared to 2020-2021.

The rate of child wasting in India has increased from 17.1% between 1998 and 2002 to 17.3% between 2016 and 2020. Moreover, the population has been hit by Covid-19 and restrictions related to the pandemic in India that leads to the highest child wasting worldwide.

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The Union Ministry of Women and Child Development released a criticism of 2021 GHI ranking. Aalso, the Indian Government claimed that publishing agencies did not thoroughly research before releasing the report and questioned the Food and Agriculture Organization for the undernourishment data. The Government claimed that the methodology used by FAO is unscientific and stated that there was no proper method used for measuring undernourishment.

In defence, the GHI publishers told that the data has not been taken from FAO’s Gallup telephone-based opinion & the Food Insecurity Experience Scale for their report. Further, they said that any developments in 2021 are still not shown in the latest dominance of undernourishment data that cover 2018-2020. Also, they pointed out that full impact of Covid-19 will be reflected in Global Health Index data in the upcoming years.

The publishers of the GHI report said that India has made “substantial progress” after 2000, and still there are areas of concern regarding child nutrition. As per GHI, the frequency of child wasting in less than five-year-old in India has increased in 2021 as compared to 2012. Meanwhile, the frequency of child stunting in less than five-year-old and the under five mortality rate have constantly declined after 2000.

The rankings cannot be compared between one year’s report to another year because different countries are included every year for the GHI ranking.

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About the Author

  Ankita Rawat is doing BA(JMC) from JIMS Vasant Kunj, New Delhi.