India scores low in hunger index

Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar fare better.

India ranks way down at 96 among 119 developing countries included in the Global Hunger Index (GHI).

This rank is well below all its neighbours, barring Bangladesh, and falls in the category in which the hunger situation is deemed "alarming". Even Nepal is four notches higher than India at number 92 and Pakistan eight points above India at number 88.

Even neighbouring countries facing continuous domestic strife, such as Myanmar and Sri Lanka, are ranked markedly above India, being placed at number 68 and 69, respectively. Mauritius is among the top 20 countries where the problem of hunger is the least. China, though ranked at number 47, falls in a category where hunger is "not a serious" issue.

The global hunger index has been created by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and was formally released globally on Tuesday last as part of the report entitled "The World's Most Deprived: Characteristics and Causes of Extreme Poverty and Hunger".

This report is the first of its kind to use household survey data to look at those living below the one-dollar-a-day line. The index is designed to capture three dimensions of hunger: lack of economic access to food, shortfalls in the nutritional status of children, and child mortality, which is, to a large extent, attributable to malnutrition.

Notably, this index reveals that while India did fairly well in combating hunger between 1992 and 1997, there has been virtually no improvement in this field in the subsequent period, between 1997 and 2003. While India's hunger index score dropped from 32.80 points (extremely alarming category) in 1992 to 25.73 points (alarming category) in 1997, it has been static between 1997 and 2003.

"The lack of improvement in India's GHI score between 1997 and 2003 despite continued growth is a cause for concern, since India's GHI still indicates alarming levels of hunger," the report categorically states.

Making a comparison between India and China, the world's two population giants in South Asia and East Asia and the Pacific, the report observes that they have made large contribution to the overall positive development in these two regions. Food energy deficiency has declined in both countries.

Child malnutrition, on the other hand, has reduced by more than 13 percentage points in India, against only 7 percentage points in China. The under-five mortality rate has also slumped by about 30 per cent in India from 1992 to 2003.

However, the report maintains that in India, the "medial poor" (living on between $ 0.50 and $ 0.75 a day) have fared better in terms of improvement in poverty and hunger than those living on between $ 0.75 and $ 1 a day.

Still, the fate of the medial poor is only marginally better than that of the "ultra poor" living at less than $ 0.50 a day.

On the whole, the report has concluded that the economic growth in developing regions during the past two decades delivered the greatest benefits for those people living just below the dollar-a-day poverty line and the least for the poorest of the poor, or ultra poor, living at less than half-a-dollar a day.

It also reckons that, across all developing regions of the world, the poorest households are most often located in remote rural areas with limited access to education, roads, and health services and members of these households often face exclusion due to their ethnicity, gender or disability.

Reducing hunger and poverty (less than a dollar line) by half by 2015 is among the Millennium Development Goals adopted by 189 member states of the United Nations in September 2000.

As the half-way mark to the target date of 2015 has already approached, there have been doubts whether these goals would be reached or not. The "business as usual" approach will simply not be sufficient to meet this pledge, the report maintains.