The Global Hunger Index, 2022 shows a ‘serious’ situation for India

In the recently released Global Hunger Index for the year 2022, India ranked 107 out of 121 countries.

• • It is an Annual report, jointly published by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe.
  • It was first produced in It is published every October. The 2022 edition marks the 17th edition of the GHI.
  • Aim: To comprehensively measure and track hunger at the global, regional, and country levels.
  • Scoring:

  Calculation: It is calculated on the basis of four indicators: Undernourishment: Share of the population with insufficient caloric intake. Child Wasting: Share of children under age five who have low weight for their height, reflecting acute undernutrition. Child Stunting: Share of children under age five who have low height for their age, reflecting chronic undernutrition. Child Mortality: The mortality rate of children under the age of five.

  • Based on the values of the four indicators, the GHI determines hunger on a 100-point scale where 0 is the best possible score (no hunger) and 100 is the worst.
  • Each country’s GHI score is classified by severity, from low to extremely alarming.

  Key Highlights of the Index:

  • India (107) ranked 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 score of 1 places it in the ‘serious’ category. 
  • China is among the countries collectively ranked between 1 and 17 having a score of less than five.
  • The 2022 GHI score for the world is considered “moderate”, but 18.2 in 2022 is only a slight improvement from 19.1 in 2014.
  • The reasons behind the drop in the position of several developing Countries remain to be the overlapping crises such as conflict, climate change, the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the Ukraine war, which has increased global food, fuel, and fertilizer prices.

India’s performance on several Indicators:

• 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%), and 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, which is a measure of the proportion of the population facing chronic deficiency of dietary energy intake, has also risen in the country from 14.6% in 2018-2020 to 16.3% in 2019-2021.
• India has shown improvement in the other two indicators - child stunting has declined from 38.7% to 35.5% between 2014 and 2022 and child mortality has also dropped from 4.6% to 3.3% in the same comparative period. 

Reasons for India’s low score performance:

• Due to disruptions in Global supply chains and Inflation
• Lack of Job Opportunities
• Poverty
• Population Explosion
• Lack of estimated targets for schemes including Children and Women.
• Other reasons are reduced soil fertility, fragmented lands, fluctuating market prices of farm produce, etc.