India has the highest child wasting rate: Global Hunger report

NEW DELHI, OCTOBER 15: The 2019 Global Hunger Index was released on Tuesday and it bears bad news for India’s children.

According to the report, India’s child wasting rate of 20.8 percent is the “highest wasting rate of any country in this report for which data or estimates were available”.

India’s child stunting rate is a similarly worrying 37.8 percent and “categorised as very high in terms of its public health significance”. The report says just 9.6 percent children aged 6 months to 23 months (one year, 11 months) “are fed a minimum acceptable diet”.

Low rank

The Global Hunger Index tracks and measures hunger across countries and India has done poorly in general. The Hunger Index has given it a score of 30.3 and ranked it at 102 out of 117 countries assessed. Although they are all together in the “serious” category, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh have all done better than India. Nepal's rank is 73, Bangladesh's 88 and Pakistan's, 94. In China, the severity is “low” and in Sri Lanka, “moderate”.

The Index considers data on such indicators as the proportion undernourished in the population, wasting and stunting in children and under-five mortality rate. Wasting in children is the condition in which they have “low weight for their height, reflecting acute undernutrition”. Stunted children have “low height for their age, reflecting chronic undernutrition”.

There is also wide disparity in the stunting rates of children under five years of age across India. In the region with the lowest rate, around 20% children are stunted but in the region with the highest rate, close to 50 percent are stunted.

Four countries – Yemen, Chad, Madagascar and Zambia – are squarely in the “alarming” category although, Liberia, Haiti and Zimbabwe are on the border between “serious” and “alarming”. Only the Central African Republic occupies the “extremely alarming” category with a Global Hunger Index score of 53.6.