NEW DELHI - With nearly one in five children too thin for their weight, India has the highest rate of child wasting in the world, the 2022 Global Hunger Index (GHI) released in October has highlighted.
It ranked India as the 15th-worst country out of 121 analysed. At No. 107, India fared worse than its neighbours Sri Lanka (ranked 64), Nepal (81), Bangladesh (84), and even Pakistan (99).
The Indian government was quick to debunk the report as an attempt to “taint India’s image”, issuing detailed rebuttals to its methodology.
But discussions in the Indian media since the report’s publication have raised questions about the country’s chronic malnutrition problem, one that still affects more than 190 million people 75 years since independence.
Despite India achieving self-sufficiency in food, hunger – interpreted by the annual GHI as distress associated with insufficient calories and a lack of critical micronutrients – remains a problem. Reasons for this include widespread poverty, inflation and inadequate food security measures by the government.
India scored 29.1 on a 100-point scale on the GHI, where zero indicates no hunger and 100, the most severe hunger.
Scores were calculated from United Nations and individual nations’ data for four key indicators: undernourishment, child stunting, child wasting and child mortality.
India’s score put its hunger severity in the “serious” category. A score of 50 and above is deemed extremely alarming.
The peer-reviewed report acknowledged India’s “substantial progress” in tackling hunger since 2000, but noted that its score has improved only around nine points from its “alarming” levels over more than two decades.
The wasting rate of 19.3 per cent for children under five was drawn from the government’s National Family Health Survey, carried out from 2019 to 2021, which also found that 35.5 per cent of children under five were stunted. This was 38.4 per cent in the 2015-16 survey.
“Overall, there has been an improvement, but it has been slow. However, what is of even more concern is that in some parts of the country, it has reversed,” academic Dipa Sinha told The Straits Times, referring to how several states have reported higher stunting and wasting rates in the government survey.
The Indian government runs the largest food security programme in the world, offering subsidised food grains to around 800 million people.
It also runs an extensive Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme to improve health and nutrition levels of children aged up to six, pregnant women and lactating mothers, besides offering midday meals to around 120 million children in more than 1.27 million government schools.
These measures, even if riddled with corruption and inefficiencies, have helped reduce hunger in the country and lift millions out of poverty. However, the pandemic and growing inflation have worsened the problem.
According to the Hunger Watch Survey, conducted in 14 states in December 2021 and January 2022, 41 per cent of the households surveyed reported that their diets’ nutritional quality had deteriorated, compared with pre-pandemic levels.
“Given this situation, it is all the more important for the government to expand and further strengthen its wide-ranging programmes that address food security and nutrition,” said Dr Sinha, who is associated with the Right to Food campaign, a civil society movement behind the Hunger Watch Survey.
While the government extended its pandemic-era scheme to offer the poor additional free food grains for another three months in September, there are concerns around inadequate funding for its food security programmes.
For instance, according to revised government figures that came into effect in October, the amount budgeted per child for a midday meal offered to children between Grade 1 and 5 in government primary schools is just 5.45 rupees (nine Singapore cents). For context, the price of an egg in India today is around six rupees.
The government also refused to sanction funding – estimated at around 40 billion rupees – for a proposal to introduce breakfast at its schools earlier this year. It even slashed the budget for the ICDS in February 2021 by more than 50 billion rupees.
Dr Vandana Prasad, a community paediatrician and a public health expert, said India’s hunger problem is “a complex representation of a much larger scenario of terrible inequity and social injustice” and cannot be undone with “top-down interventions”.
She said deeper structural changes are needed, including greater inclusion of citizen and other stakeholders’ viewpoints in deciding food policies, besides flexible and decentralised programmes that incorporate a diverse diet. “That is just undebatable,” she told ST.
“We need to invert the balance of power between people as just passive recipients of whatever food is thrown their way to people becoming very active players in the whole business of nutrition,” she added.
