Untruely, the government asserts that one of the indicators is based on a public opinion survey.
The ranking of India at 107 out of 121 nations has been rejected once more by the administration, which referred to it as “an inaccurate measure of hunger” and an effort to “taint” India’s reputation. It also falsely asserts that an opinion poll was the basis for the rankings.
India’s GHI score of 29.1 on a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 denoting no hunger, was lower than the score of 28.2 in 2014, according to the Global Hunger Report 2022. Except for Afghanistan, which has been devastated by war, India ranked lower than its neighbors. On the other hand, China was among the nations ranked between 1 and 17 for having minor hunger.
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“Three out of the four indicators used for calculation of the index are related to the health of Children and cannot be representative of the entire population,” according to a press release from the Ministry of Women and Child Development. The government has disapproved of the GHI rankings for the past two years.
It also states that the estimate of the population’s proportion of undernourished (PoU) is based on a tiny sample size of 3000 respondents using the Food and Agriculture Organization’s “Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES)” Survey Module, a claim that was also refuted by Global Hunger Index representatives the previous year.
The GHI scores are used to generate four indicators—undernourishment, child stunting, child wasting, and child mortality.
According to the GHI’s website, it does not use FIES but rather the FAO’s Food Balance Sheet, which is mainly based on information that member nations, including India, formally disclose. This indicator measures the prevalence of undernourishment. These demonstrate the trends in the general national food supply, expose adjustments that may have been made to the diet or the types of foods consumed, and demonstrate how well the national food supply meets nutritional needs.
The GHI further explains on its website that it uses three of the four total indicators that are specifically related to children to evaluate the level of hunger in a nation to “ensure that both the food supply situation of the population as a whole and the effects of inadequate nutrition within a particularly vulnerable subset of the population are captured.”
