Why it is in news?

• Recently released GHI puts India on rank 100 out of 119 countries
• Worse than Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
• India’s hunger problem is worse than North Korea’s, the report sayst

Highlights

• On the GHI severity scale, India is at the high end of the “serious” category, owing mainly to the fact that one in every five children under age 5 is “wasted” (low weight for height).
• With 21% of under-5 children suffering from wasting, the report notes, India is one of the very few countries that have made no strides over the last 25 years in checking the prevalence of this indicator
• Only three other countries in GHI 2017 — Djibouti, Sri Lanka, and South Sudan — have a child-wasting prevalence over 20%.
• Child wasting is one of four indicators in the GHI. In India, it has increased in India from 17.1% in 1998-02 to 21% in 2012-16. This is way above the global prevalence: 9.5% of all under-5 children suffer from wasting.
  

What is GHI?

• The GHI captures the multidimensional nature of hunger based on four indicators.
1. undernourishment (share of the population with insufficient calorific intake),
2.  under-5 child wasting,
3.  under-5 child stunting (low height for age), and
4. under-5 child mortality.
•  The data analysed for each country to arrive at the 2017 GHI score pertains to the period 2012-16.
• The 2017 GHI has been jointly published by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Concern Worldwide, and Welthungerhilfe.
• Theme for year 2017: The Inequalities of Hunger

• India’s overall GHI score has improved from 38.2 in 2000 to 31.4 in 2017, but it is among the worst performers in South Asia, slightly better than only two other countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
•  Last year, India ranked 97th out of 118 countries; in 2015, it ranked 80th out of 104.
  
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• On the other three indicators, however, India has reported an improvement, especially on child stunting. The report notes that the child stunting rate, while relatively high at 38.4%, has gone down over the year, from 61.9% in 1992
• Child wasting reflects acute under-nutrition caused by prolonged period of poor diet, repeated illnesses, and poor sanitation.

About SDG

• The report  points out that while India claimed a “massive scale-up” of two national nutrition programmes, the Integrated Child Development Services and the National Health Mission, it has failed to achieve adequate coverage.
• The results of this year’s Global Hunger Index show that we cannot waiver in our resolve to reach the UN Sustainable Development Goal of zero hunger by 2030 

Areas of concern

1. The timely introduction of complementary foods for young children (that is, the transition away from exclusive breastfeeding), which declined from 52.7% to 42.7% between 2006 and 2016;
2.  The share of children between 6 and 23 months old who receive an adequate diet — a mere 9.6% for the country.
3.  Household access to improved sanitation facilities — a likely factor in child health and nutrition — which stood at 48.4% as of 2016.