India has the highest child wasting rate in the world: Global Hunger Index 2023

NEW DELHI: The Global Hunger Index 2023 released on Thursday, has revealed that India has the highest rate of child wasting in the world with 18.7% of the surveyed children facing malnutrition.

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) defines child wasting as the percentage of children under five years old who have low weight for their height. The Global Hunger Index is published by Concern Worldwide and Welt Hunger Hilfe, non-government organisations (NGOs) from Ireland and Germany respectively.

India also has an extremely high child stunting rate of 35.5%, which is the 15th highest in the world, the report said. Child stunting is calculated from the percentage of children under the age of five who have low height for their age.

The report also noted that the prevalence of anaemia in women aged between 15 and 24 years in India stood at 58.1 percent, which is one of the highest in the world.

Global Hunger Index: Below Pakistan, Bangladesh

India has slipped to 111 among 127 countries in the latest GHI rankings, down from 107 in 2022. Only Afghanistan, Haiti, and 14 other African countries have performed worse than India in the index. India has also performed worse than all its neighbours, Pakistan (102), Bangladesh (81), Nepal (69), and Sri Lanka (60).

The report noted that although India’s food supply has gone up its prevalence for undernourishment has also increased.

“India’s per capita dietary energy supply has gone up somewhat in recent years. However, this increase has been offset by increases in the incidence of caloric losses at the retail distribution level, increased dietary energy requirements of the population, and an increased coefficient of variation (a measure of the inequality of caloric intake across a given population). As a result, India’s prevalence of undernourishment has increased somewhat each year between 2016–2018 and 2020–2022,” the report said.

The index is calculated based on four indicators: undernourishment, child wasting, child stunting, and child mortality. The GHI 2023 has placed countries in the following categories according to the severity of problems. These are low, moderate, serious, alarming and extremely alarming.

With an index rating of 28.7, India has been put in the severe category. China and 19 other countries have been put in the category of the best performing countries.

World hunger index ‘erroneous’: Government

However, the Government of India has responded to the report calling the index “an erroneous measure of hunger with serious methodological issues” and that the report “shows a malafide intent”.

“The Global Hunger Index continues to be a flawed measure of ‘Hunger’ and does not reflect India’s true position. The index is an erroneous measure of hunger and suffers from serious methodological issues. 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 fourth and most important indicator ‘Proportion of Undernourished (PoU) population’ is based on an opinion poll conducted on a very small sample size of 3,000,” the ministry of women and child development said in a statement.