India ranked 94 among 107 nations in the Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2020 and is in the serious hunger category with experts blaming poor implementation processes and lack of effective monitoring in tackling malnutrition and poor performance by large states behind the low ranking.
According to the report, 14% of India’s population is undernourished. It also showed the country recorded a 37.4% stunting rate among children under five and a wasting rate of 17.3%. The under-five mortality rate stood at 3.7%.
The Global Hunger Index is a tool for comprehensively measuring and tracking hunger at global, regional, and national levels.
GHI scores are based on the values of four component 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), and child mortality (mortality rate of children under age five, partly reflecting the fatal mix of inadequate nutrition and unhealthy environments).
Based on the values of the four indicators, the GHI determines hunger on a 100-point scale where 0 is the best possible score (no hunger) and 100 is the worst. Each country’s GHI score is classified by severity, from low to extremely alarming.
For the 2020 GHI report, data were assessed for 132 countries. Out of these, there were sufficient data to calculate 2020 GHI scores for and rank 107 countries (by way of comparison, data availability allowed for the ranking of 117 countries in the 2019 report). For 25 countries, individual scores could not be calculated and ranks could not be determined owing to lack of data.
