‘Misinformation is the hallmark of Global Hunger Index 2022’: India slams rating as attempt to taint country’s image

New Delhi: India on Saturday slammed the recently published Global Hunger Index 2022 calling it an erroneous measure of hunger and stressing that the index suffers from serious methodological issues.

The Global Hunger Report 2022 which was released by the Concern Worldwide and Welt Hunger Hilfe, non-government organisations from Ireland and Germany respectively, has ranked India at 107 among 121 countries.

“The index is an erroneous measure of hunger and suffers from serious methodological issues. Three out of the four indicators used for calculation of the index are related to health of children and cannot be representative of the entire population. The fourth and most important indicator estimate of Proportion of Undernourished (PoU) population is based on an opinion poll conducted on a very small sample size of 3000,” a statement from the Ministry of Women and Child Development read.

Pointing out that the Indian government has been running the largest food security programme in the world, the ministry said, “The report is not only disconnected from ground reality but also chooses to deliberately ignore efforts made by India to ensure food security for the population especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Taking a one-dimensional view, the report lowers India’s rank based on the estimate of Proportion of Undernourished (PoU) population for India at 16.3%.”

It appears, the ministry reiterated, that the data was collected from a miniscule sample for a country of India’s size and proportion.

“The data has been used to compute PoU value for India which is not only wrong & unethical, but it also reeks of obvious bias The publishing agencies of the Global Hunger Report, Concern Worldwide and Welt Hunger Hilfe, have evidently not done their due diligence before releasing the report,” the statement read.

The ministry further said under Anganwadi Services, since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, supplementary nutrition was provided to approximately 7.71 crore children upto the age of 6 years and to 1.78 crore pregnant women and lactating mothers.

“The per capita dietary energy supply in India, as estimated by FAO from the Food Balance Sheets, has been increasing year-on-year owing to enhanced production of major agricultural commodities in the country over the years and there is absolutely no reason why the country’s undernourishment levels should increase,” the statement said.

Mentioning the three other indicators apart from PoU, included in the Global Hunger Index– primarily stunting, wasting and under 5 mortality– the ministry said these indicators are outcomes of complex interactions of various other factors like drinking water, 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. Calculating hunger, based on mainly indicators relating to health indicators of children is neither scientific nor rational, it pointed out.

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