Global Hunger Index
#GS-02 Social Justice
For Prelims:
About Global Hunger Index:
- Global Hunger Index is published by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe (NGOs) jointly.
- It is published every October starting from 2006.
- It’s aimed to comprehensively measure and track hunger at the global, regional, and country levels.
It is calculated on the basis of four indicators:
- Undernourishment: Share of the population with insufficient caloric intake.
- Child Wasting: Share of children under age five who have low weight for their height, reflecting acute undernutrition.
- Child Stunting: Share of children under age five who have low height for their age, reflecting chronic undernutrition.
- Child Mortality: The mortality rate of children under the age of five.
For Mains:
About Global Hunger Index 2022:
- India has been categorised as ‘serious’ category at rank 107 out of 121 countries.
- Afghanistan is the only South Asian country that lags behind India in the listing.
- Sri Lanka (64), Nepal (81), Bangladesh (84) and Pakistan (99) ranked higher than India.
- China is among the countries collectively ranked between 1 and 17 having a score of less than five.
- India’s child wasting rate (low weight for height), at 19.3%, 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 16.3% in 2019-2021.
- This means that 224.3 million people in India considered undernourished.
- But India has shown improvement in child stunting, which has declined from 38.7% to 35.5% between 2014 and 2022, as well as child mortality which has also dropped from 4.6% to 3.3% in the same comparative period.
- On the whole, India has shown a slight worsening with its GHI score increasing from 28.2 in 2014 to 29.1 in 2022.
