Global Hunger Index is out, India in ‘serious’ category at rank 107

Source: The post is based on the article “Global Hunger Index is out, India in ‘serious’ category at rank 107″ published in The Hindu on 15^th October 2022.

What is the News?

This year’s Global Hunger Index, 2022 has been released.

What is Global Hunger Index?

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is a tool for comprehensively measuring and tracking hunger at global, regional, and national levels.

GHI scores are based on the values of four component indicators – undernourishment, child stunting, child wasting and child mortality.

Countries are divided into five categories of hunger on the basis of their score, which are ‘low’, ‘moderate’, ‘serious’, ‘alarming’ and ‘extremely alarming’.

Based on the values of the four indicators, a GHI score is calculated on a 100-point scale reflecting the severity of hunger, where zero is the best score (no hunger) and 100 is the worst.

The GHI is an annual report and each set of GHI scores uses data from a 5-year period. The 2022 GHI scores are calculated using data from 2017 through 2021.

What are the findings of the Global Hunger Index, 2022?

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.

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.

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). This 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 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.

Child stunting and child mortality: India has shown improvement in child stunting, which has declined from 38.7% to 35.5% between 2014 and 2022. Similarly, child mortality has also dropped from 4.6% to 3.3% in the same comparative period.

Overall, India has shown a slight worsening with its GHI score increasing from 28.2 in 2014 to 29.1 in 2022.