Hunger pangs

India continues to lag in eradicating malnutrition

The latest edition of the Global Hunger Index (GHI), the 12th such exercise by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), makes for a sobering read. The GHI ranks countries based on four key indicators: Undernourishment, child mortality, child wasting, and child stunting. Of the 119 countries in the developing world ranked in the 2017 report, nearly half the countries fell in the “extremely alarming”, “alarming”, or “serious” categories of hunger levels. However, the level of hunger in developing countries has declined by 27 per cent from what it was in the year 2000. India, however, has been ranked 100 of the 119 countries. At a score of 31.4 — a higher score is worse — India’s 2017 GHI score is towards the higher end of the hunger scale and the country has been placed in the “serious” category. Within Asia, it has the third-highest score — only Pakistan and Afghanistan fare worse — and its poor levels of nutrition are seen as one of the main factors pushing South Asia to the category of the worst-performing region on the GHI this year, followed closely by Africa south of the Sahara, the IFPRI report says.

This is not to suggest that India has not made considerable strides in improving these metrics. The data from the early 1990s reveals that over the last quarter of a century, India has been able to reduce the proportion of undernourished population from 21.7 per cent to 14.5 per cent, the prevalence of stunting (or low height for their age, reflecting chronic undernutrition) in children under five years of age from 62 per cent to 38.4 per cent, and the under-five mortality rate from almost 12 per cent to 4.8 per cent. Yet, on the fourth parameter — prevalence of wasting (or low weight for their height, reflecting acute undernutrition) in children under five years — India has become worse over this long period. The report finds that only three other countries in the world — Djibouti, Sri Lanka, and South Sudan — show child wasting levels worse than India’s. In fact, on this count, even Pakistan and Afghanistan score less than half of India’s score.

Close to six years ago, in January 2012, the then prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had accepted that despite two decades of rapid economic growth, almost half the children in the country were under-weight. Dr Singh had described India’s child malnutrition as “unacceptably high” and a “national shame”. The 2017 GHI underscores the stubborn nature of malnutrition prevalent in the country even after several national and state-level efforts to eradicate it. What is still worse is that a country like India also suffers from massive nutritional inequality; in other words, the worse-off in the country — typically those with the least social, economic, and political power such as women and girls, ethnic minorities, and the rural poor — are far more malnourished than what these dreadful aggregate figures suggest. India cannot be the superpower it hopes to be if a vast majority of its youth, especially young girls, continue to be so malnourished. It is time to redouble the resolve to eradicate hunger.