India has slipped six places and is now ranked 107 out of 121 countries in the global hunger index report that was released on Saturday, meaning India is now on par with several countries from sub-Saharan Africa and from South Asia is only ahead of Afghanistan -- a country that India has been helping with food grain supplies in the wake of an ongoing famine there.
The response to the government has been typical -- something which has now come to become a norm -- accuse the rating or indexing agency of trying to defame India with dubious methodology -- while simultaneously claiming that India has one of the largest food procurement and distribution systems in the world and that food is often distributed free even to the poorest.
While the government might be right to claim it is distributing the most food in the world and has a robust system to ensure that the food is distributed all across the country, it is missing the entire point of the hunger index.
The hunger index measures outcomes -- that is it surveys the nutritional parameters across the population across the country, especially checking for child nutrition and parameters like child stunting and child wasting -- that is caused due to malnutrition, while also measuring for undernourishment in the general population before arriving at the final index. India clearly scores very poorly on these parameters -- even if that may not be readily visible -- and should be a cause of concern.
The government, however, has taken all the wrong lessons from the index. Rather than examining the shortfalls in the programme -- the quality of the grain being distributed, their nutritional value, whether those undernourished belong to any oppressed castes or sections of society or any other shortfalls in distribution that may arise.
It is well known that rice and wheat -- both of which make up the bulk of the commodities -- are distributed under the public distribution system, the PM Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana Scheme and other schemes of the central and state governments. However, neither of the two grains is particularly nutritious and does not in any way help meet the human body’s daily balanced diet requirements. While they might help the recipients get two square meals a day, those two meals are not particularly nutritious especially if it is all that the families that receive them are eating.
To be sure the government is also distributing pulses like dal and beans but they are of a limited quantity and are not nearly enough, especially for a family that would otherwise be going hungry. Add to this the not-so-subtle vegetarian ideology of the ruling party that has meant that even ensuring boiled eggs are distributed as part of mid-day meals to children requires much lobbying and pushback from those within the government who control the narrative.
In these circumstances, the bizarre rebuttal of the Global Hunger Index report makes one believe that the government looks at this as an image problem rather than a real problem that needs to be tackled. It is this attitude that has got us here in the first place and the sooner we shun it the better.
