Erroneous, Methodological Issues: India Rejects Poor Hunger Index Rating

Coming down heavily on Global Hunger Index (GHI) yet again, the union government on Sunday termed the 2022 GHI report an "erroneous measure of hunger".

The government claimed that the report "suffers from serious methodological issues" as India has slipped to the 107 position in 2022 from 101 in 2021.

With a score of 29.1, India has a level of hunger that is serious, as per the data available on the GHI website.

The Ministry of Women and Child Development in a statement said, "A consistent effort is yet again visible to taint India’s image as a nation that does not fulfill the food security and nutritional requirements of its population."

"Misinformation seems to be the hallmark of the annually released Global Hunger Index," said the ministry in a sharp statement. 

The hunger report 2022 was released by Concern Worldwide and Welt Hunger Hilfe, non-government organisations from Ireland and Germany respectively. 

"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," the statement read.  

It further said that the fourth and most important indicator estimate of the proportion of the undernourished (PoU) population is based on an opinion poll conducted on a very small sample size of 3000.

As per the ministry, the report is not only disconnected from ground reality but also chooses to deliberately ignore efforts made by the government to ensure food security for the population, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

"The data collected from a minuscule sample for a country of India’s size through FIES has been used to compute PoU value for India which is not only wrong and unethical, it also reeks of obvious bias," it added. 

The publishing agencies of the Global Hunger Report, Concern Worldwide and Welt Hunger Hilfe, have evidently not done their due diligence before releasing the report, said the ministry.