Global Hunger Index Report: India’s rank falls from 94th to 101st in 2021

Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2021 report suggested that India has slipped to the 101st position of 116 countries, from its 2020 position of 94th and is behind its neighbours Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.

Eighteen countries, including China, Brazil and Kuwait, shared the top rank with a GHI score of less than five, the website of the Global Hunger Index that tracks hunger and malnutrition said on Thursday.

GHI report is jointly by Irish aid agency Concern Worldwide and German organisation Welt Hunger Hilfe. They termed the level of hunger in India “alarming”.

In 2020, India was ranked 94th out of 107 countries. Now with 116 countries in the fray, it has dropped to 101st rank. India’s GHI score has also decelerated – from 38.8 in 2000 to the range of 28.8 – 27.5 between 2012 and 2021.

Here’s how the GHI score is calculated

The GHI score is calculated on four indicators, undernourishment; child wasting (the share of children under the age of five who are wasted i.e who have low weight for their height, reflecting acute undernutrition); child stunting (children under the age of five who have low height for their age, reflecting chronic undernutrition) and child mortality (the mortality rate of children under the age of five).

The share of wasting among children in India rose from 17.1 per cent between 1998-2002 to 17.3 per cent between 2016-2020, according to the report.

“People have been severely hit by COVID-19 and by pandemic related restrictions in India, the country with the highest child wasting rate worldwide,” the report said.

Neighbouring countries like Nepal (76), Bangladesh (76), Myanmar (71) and Pakistan (92) are also in the ‘alarming’ hunger category but have fared better at feeding their citizens than India, according to the report.

However, India has shown improvement in other indicators such as the under-5 mortality rate, prevalence of stunting among children and prevalence of undernourishment owing to inadequate food, the report said.

As per the report, the fight against hunger is dangerously off track. Based on the current GHI projections, the world as a whole – and 47 countries in particular – will fail to achieve a low level of hunger by 2030.