Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2023

Context:

India has been ranked at 111 out of 125 countries in the Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2023, further lowering its position to 107 (out of 121 countries) in 2022.

Highlights of the Index:

About: The Global Hunger Index is a tool for comprehensively measuring and tracking hunger at global, regional, and national levels.
Indicators: The scores are based on the values of four component indicators:
- Undernourishment based on caloric intake,
- Child (under age five) stunting based on height,
- Child (under age five) wasting based on weight, and
- Child mortality (before age five).
Based on the values of the four indicators, a GHI score is calculated on a 100-point scale reflecting the severity of hunger, where 0 is the best possible score (no hunger) and 100 is the worst.
Key points:
- Performance of India: The index has put India’s child wasting rate at 7 per cent highest in the world during 2018–22 reflecting acute undernutrition.
- The rate of undernourishment in India stood at 6 per cent and under-five mortality at 3.1 per cent.
- The report also mentioned that the prevalence of anaemia in women aged between 15 and 24 years stood at 1 per cent.
- The overall score for India has been put at 7 in the ranking, which is categorized as serious.
India’s neighbouring countries: Pakistan (102), Bangladesh (81), Nepal (69th), and Sri Lanka (60), have fared better than them in the index.
Global scenario:
- The 2023 GHI score for the world is 3, considered moderate and less than one point below the world’s 2015 GHI score of 19.1.
- Since 2017, the prevalence of undernourishment, one of the indicators used in the calculation of GHI scores, has been on the rise, and the number of undernourished people has climbed from 572 million to about 735 million.
Concerns: The compounding impacts of climate change, conflicts, economic shocks, the global pandemic, and the Russia-Ukraine war have exacerbated social and economic inequalities and slowed or reversed previous progress in reducing hunger in many countries.