Saquib Salim

“They don’t tell lies, they speak half-truths”, these words of my editor Aasha Khosa replayed in my mind as I am seeing a barrage of tweets, articles, and WhatsApp forwards on the latest Global Hunger Index results published by Welt Hunger Life, a German organisation. Several politicians and journalists haven’t missed the ‘golden’ opportunity to train their guns at the opposition. The government under tremendous public pressure also came out with an explanation questioning the very validity of this index.

Without going into the technicalities, first of all, a question should be asked: can we compare the scores of previous years to this year? The report on page no. 39 says, “No—GHI scores are comparable within each year’s report, but not between different years’ reports. The current and historical data on which the GHI scores are based are continually being revised and improved by the United Nations agencies that compile them, and each year’s GHI report reflects these changes. Comparing scores between reports may create the impression that hunger has changed positively or negatively in a specific country from year to year, whereas in some cases the change may partly or fully reflect a data revision.” Similarly, the report clearly states that a comparison of rankings will give a wrong picture. 

Now, we should come to a point on how this Hunger Index is calculated. The score is based on four factors, “Undernourishment: the share of the population whose caloric intake is insufficient; Child stunting: the share of children under the age of five who have low height for their age, reflecting chronic undernutrition; Child wasting: the share of children under the age of five who have low weight for their height, reflecting acute undernutrition; and Child mortality: the share of children who die before their fifth birthday, reflecting in part the fatal mix of inadequate nutrition and unhealthy environments.”

Of these 1/3rd weightage of the score comes from undernourishment, the traditional definition of hunger. Child stunting and child wasting contribute 1/6th part each and child mortality carries 1/3rd proportion of the score. All data is taken from published reports of the United Nations. The transparency of the index is seldom questioned.

Another question we should ask is, what’s the time frame of the study? The 2022 GHI is based on, undernourishment data from 2019–2021; child stunting and child wasting data from 2017–2021, with the most current data from that range used for each country; and child mortality data from 2020. Previously also, GHI published in a particular year represented a range.

Now, come to the specific heads, which the report itself compared. The traditional definition of hunger, which lay people understand, comes under the head of undernourishment. On a scale of 0 to 100, 0 being the best and 100 the worst, India scored 16.3. Among neighbouring nations, it is better than Pakistan, 16.9, and Afghanistan, 29.8, while Nepal and Sri Lanka fared better. In fact, at 3.4, Sri Lanka seems one of the best in Asia.

Now, people are pointing out that with a severe economic crisis in Sri Lanka how is this possible? The answer lies in the period of data collection which ended in 2021 before the crisis hit the island country. Since its inception in 2000, this score has been bettered by India from 18.4 to 16.3, where 2014 saw a peak at 14.3.

In child mortality, India does fairly better with a score of 3.3, a great improvement from 9.2 in 2000 and 4.6 in 2014. Again, India scores better than Pakistan and Afghanistan while Sri Lanka and Nepal fare better on this front. 

In child stunting, India improved its score from 54.2 in 2000 to 35.5 in 2022. Here again, the comparison with neighbours followed the pattern.

The overall ranking suffered from a low score of 19.3 in child wasting. Which deteriorated from 17.1 in 2000. The report notes, “India’s child wasting rate, at 19.3 percent, is the highest of any country in the world and drives up the region’s average owing to India’s large population”. 

The picture is not so simple. The report points out unequal regional growth within India. It notes, “The example of India shows the importance of considering the subnational context when designing programs and policies to target child stunting. Researchers investigated the factors that contributed to a decline in stunting in four Indian states between 2006 and 2016: Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Odisha, and Tamil Nadu.

They found that stunting fell mainly in response to improvements in the coverage of health and nutrition interventions, household conditions (such as socioeconomic status and food security), and maternal factors (such as mothers’ health and education). While improvements in household conditions were the most important factor for each of the four states, the second most important factor varies by state. As the authors conclude, this variability across states “indicates the need for contextualized policy and programmatic initiatives to help focus the efforts in the sectors that need the most attention for continued decline in stunting” “

What we get from this report is that there is a regional disparity within India which should be addressed while Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha fared better while others lagged. Indian score suffers from child wasting, i.e., low weight of under-five kids. But then how is India improving upon child mortality? Aren’t they interrelated? They must be but in the South Asian context they are not. The report notes, “Patterns of wasting among young children of different ages shed light on child wasting in South Asia. The child wasting rate in South Asia is highest at birth and then consistently declines to the age of three, at which point it becomes fairly steady.” 

So, a complete study shows that we need a lot of improvement but the argument that India has slipped down in the index does not hold. India has improved upon absolute hunger and mortality, two very important markers. The marker, where India lagged, has been found to become constant at a certain later age.

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A long road is ahead for India and political parties need to focus on existing issues rather than invent them, in this way the country will progress more. Government should focus on accelerating the development, rather than blaming the report. The report is not as depressing as social media is portraying.