‘Flawed’: India rejects Global Hunger Index

In yet another dismissal of the Global Hunger Index, the Union Ministry of Women & Child Development said the report has presented a “flawed” measure of hunger in India.

A release by the ministry said that findings from its ICT application Poshan Tracker showed that the nutritional measurement of over 7 crore children showed wasting in only a third of what was shown in the Global Hunger Index.

The Global Hunger Report 2023 released by Concern Worldwide and Welt Hunger Hilfe, NGOs from Ireland and Germany, respectively, has ranked India at 111 among 125 countries.

The ministry said that since April 2023, the measurement data of children under 5 years uploaded on the Poshan Tracker has “consistently increased”, going from 6.34 crore in April 2023 to 7.24 crore in September 2023. “The percentage of child wasting, as seen on the Poshan Tracker, has been consistently below 7.2 per cent, as compared to the value of 18.7 per cent used for child wasting in the Global Hunger Index 2023,” the ministry said.

“The Global Hunger Index continues to be a flawed measure of ‘Hunger’ and does not reflect India’s true position… The index is an erroneous measure of hunger and suffers from serious methodological issues,” it said.

“Three out of the four indicators used for calculation of the index are related to the health of children and cannot be representative of the entire population. The fourth and most important indicator ‘Proportion of Undernourished (PoU) population’ is based on an opinion poll conducted on a very small sample size of 3000,” the release stated.

“Two other indicators, namely, Stunting and Wasting are outcomes of complex interactions of various other factors like sanitation, genetics, environment and utilisation of food intake apart from hunger which is taken as the causative/outcome factor for stunting and wasting in the GHI. Also, there is hardly any evidence that the fourth indicator, namely, child mortality is an outcome of hunger,” it further added.

The government also said that till now, among the 13.96 lakh Anganwadi centres registered on the application, 10.3 crore beneficiaries, including pregnant women, lactating mothers, children under six years, and adolescent girls are tracked by the Poshan Tracker on nutritional parameters. These parameters, the ministry said, have “incorporated WHO’s expanded tables, which provide day-based z-scores, to dynamically determine stunting, wasting, underweight, and obesity status based on a child’s height, weight & age”.