• India ranks 107 out of 121 countries on the Global Hunger Index in which it fares worse than all countries in South Asia barring war-torn Afghanistan.
• The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is a tool for comprehensively measuring and tracking hunger at global, regional, and national levels.
• It is jointly published by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe.
• The GHI score is calculated on four indicators — undernourishment; child wasting (the share of children under age five 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 GHI score is calculated on a 100-point scale reflecting the severity of hunger, where zero is the best score (no hunger) and 100 is the worst.
• India’s score of 29.1 places it in the ‘serious’ category.
• India also ranks 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 child wasting rate (low weight for height), at 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 3% in 2019-2021.
• This translates into3 million people in India considered undernourished out of the total 828 million people undernourished globally.
• 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%.
• 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.

Model Question

Q. With reference to the Global Hunger Index (GHI), consider the following statements :

1. The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is released by the World Bank.
2. In the latest index, India has shown improvement in the child stunting and child mortality.
3. Afghanistan is the only country in South Asia that performs worse than India on the index.

Which of the statements given above is /are correct?

(a) 1 only

(b) 2 and 3 only

(c) 1 and 3 only

(d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer : B

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