Global Hunger Index

#GS-02 Social Justice

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.

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.

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.