Global Hunger Index: India slips from 55 in 2014 to 102 in 2019

NEW DELHI: India ranked 102 out of 117 countries in terms of severity of hunger, according to this year’s Global Hunger Index (GHI) report.

The annual report prepared jointly by Concern Worldwide, an Irish aid agency, and Welt Hunger Hilfe, a German organisation has classified India as a country with the “severest problem of hunger.”

The fall in India’s rank is sharper as it has slipped from 55th rank in 2014 to 102nd in a list of 117 countries and is behind its neighbours Nepal (73), Pakistan (94) and Bangladesh (88), as per reports.

GHI scores countries on a 100-point “severity scale”. Zero is the best score and a reading above 100 is the worst. 

The improvement in India’s GHI score, too, has decelerated. At 30.3, India’s 2019 GHI (Global Hunger Index) score is at the high, a level of hunger that is ‘serious.’

“India’s child wasting rate is extremely high at 20.8 per cent, the highest for any country in this report,” the annual report said further adding the ‘Child stunting’ is at 37.9%.

The GHI ranks countries based on four key indicators— undernourishment, child wasting, child stunting and child mortality.

“Using this combination of indicators to measure hunger offers several advantages. The indicators included in the GHI formula reflect caloric deficiencies as well as poor nutrition. The undernourishment indicator captures the nutrition situation of the population as a whole, while the indicators specific to children reflect the nutrition status within a particularly vulnerable subset of the population…” the GHI report says.