UPSC Articles
Global Hunger lndex 2021
Part of: Prelims
In News: India’s score is 27.5 and it has ranked 101 among 116 countries.
What is the Global Hunger Index?
- The GHI is an annual peer-reviewed publication by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe.
- It aims to track hunger at global, regional and national levels.
- It uses four parameters to calculate its scores –
- Undernourishment
- child wasting
- child stunting and
- Child mortality
- Information from the World Health Organization, the World Bank and the United Nations are taken to calculate these parameters.
- All these international organisations draw from national data, which, in India’s case, includes the National Family Health Surveys (NFHS).
Global Hunger Index (GHI) does not reflect India’s true picture as it is a flawed measure of ‘Hunger’.
It should not be taken at face value as it is neither appropriate nor representative of hunger prevalent in a country. Out of its four indicators, only one indicator, i.e., undernourishment, is directly related to hunger.
- The two indicators, namely, Stunting and Wasting are outcomes of complex interactions of various other factors like 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.
- Also, there is hardly any evidence that the fourth indicator, namely, child mortality is an outcome of hunger.
News Source: PIB
