Editorial. Scrawny data

The Global Hunger Index, a peer reviewed annual publication from Concern Worldwide and Welthungerlife, has set off a controversy with its low ranking assigned to India in 2022. Out of the 121 countries ranked, India comes in at 107. The report calls India’s score of 29.1 as ‘serious’ but the government has refused to accept it with the Ministry of Child and Family Welfare terming the index ‘an erroneous measure of hunger and suffering from serious methodological issues’. The arguments forwarded by the government and other critics seem to have merit. The dire picture painted by the index about starving masses may not be accurate, given the government’s schemes to ensure food security to the under-privileged during the pandemic. That said, the extent of undernourishment among Indian children and the child mortality rate as captured by the NFHS-5 needs to be addressed.

The GHI is derived from four indicators — undernourishment in the population, stunting in children aged under five years, child wasting or share of children under five with low weight for their height, and share of children who die before their fifth birthday. The authors of the report argue that undernourishment can be used to assess inadequate access to food and that this metric is used as lead indicator for measuring global hunger targets including UN SDG 2. But the GHI has captured undernourishment in India through Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) survey conducted through Gallup World poll, with a sample size of just 3,000. The survey asks eight questions, some of which are vague. The other three indicators relate to children aged under five and may not be representative of the entire population. Besides this, the mean values used in the GHI to measure stunting and wasting may not be strictly applicable to India, given the genetic differences. On the whole, a survey with a very small sample-size and health metrics for children under five, is unconvincing.

There is, however, no denying that a lot of work needs to be done to alleviate undernourishment and improve access to nutritious food. The National Family Health Survey, 2019-21 shows under-five years mortality rate at 42 per 1,000 live births. Stunting of children under five was 36 per centand wasting at 19 per cent. These numbers are among the worst globally, comparable with under-developed African countries. The Saksham Anganwadi and Poshan 2.0 scheme which have subsumed Anganwadi Services, Poshan Abhiyaan and Scheme for Adolescent Girls under the ICDS seek to address the problem of undernourishment in the country in early childhood and thereafter. But the delivery of these programmes to the target group needs to be improved. Budgetary allocations need to be larger; the sum set aside for the schemes have remained almost unchanged in Budget 2022-23. Peninsular States which have implemented mid-day meal schemes in schools have seen improved health and literacy outcomes among children. The Centre should try to coax all States to do the same.

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