Global Hunger Index 2022

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Context

India ranked 107 out of 121 countries on the Global Hunger Index 2022. It fares worse than all countries in South Asia barring war-torn Afghanistan.

Global Hunger Index

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is a tool that measures and tracks hunger globally as well as by region and by country, prepared by European NGOs of Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe. The GHI is calculated annually.
The index is based on four indicators — under-nourishment, wasting, stunting and under-five mortality.
While undernourishment represents the share of the population with insufficient caloric intake, child stunting indicates the share of children under age five who have low height for their age, reflecting chronic undernutrition. Child wasting reflects acute undernutrition in children under age five with low weight for their height.
Each set of GHI scores uses data from a 5-year period. The 2022 GHI scores are calculated using data from 2017 through 2021.

India’s Performance

India slipped six places on Global Hunger Index 2022 to take 107th position out of 121 countries ranked.
India has been ranked behind all south Asian countries except the war-torn Afghanistan.
India’s score of 29.1 places it in the ‘serious’ category.
Neighbouring Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Myanmar have been ranked 99, 64, 84, 81, and 71 respectively – all countries above India. As many as 17 countries have been collectively ranked between 1 and 17 with 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 translates into 224.3 million people in India considered undernourished out of the total 828 million people undernourished globally.
India has shown improvement in the other two indicators - child stunting has declined from 38.7% to 35.5% between 2014 and 2022 and child mortality 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.

Global Scenario

There are 44 countries that currently have “serious” or “alarming” hunger levels.
Globally, progress against hunger has largely stagnated in recent years. The 2022 GHI score of 18.2 for the world is considered “moderate”, but 18.2 in 2022 is only a slight improvement from 19.1 in 2014. This is due to overlapping crises such as conflict, climate change, the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the Ukraine war, which has increased global food, fuel, and fertiliser prices and is expected to “worsen hunger in 2023 and beyond.”

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