Global Hunger Index: Misplaced Debate and Ignoring Priorities -Achin Chakraborty and Simantini Mukhopadhyay

-The India Forum

The annual public debate over the poorly constructed Global Hunger Index is all hot air; in the process the critical issue of child undernutrition in India, where authentic data is available showing very slow improvement, gets ignored.

In the seminal book An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen lamented that "social failures that are of enormous importance for development" received scant attention in public debate and democratic politics in India (Drèze and Sen 2013: 282). Almost a decade later, we find issues such as hunger and undernutrition occupying the centre-stage of public debate, but with an unwarranted focus on sensationalised global rankings and indices.

“The Global Hunger Index 2022 reveals a dramatic hunger situation worldwide,” Welt Hunger Hilfe spokesperson Laura Reiner wrote on the Global Hunger Index (GHI) website. Indeed, what India witnesses in the name of public debate each year after the index is released is a repetitious drama, that is predictable, ill-scripted and misleading. The opposition and a large section of the media consider it an opportune moment to pounce on the ruling party, whose fetish for global rankings is well known. This year too, newspapers were flooded with headlines highlighting India’s ‘fall’ or ‘slip’ down the league table of countries to 107 from 101.

Predictably, the government saw this as a conspiracy to tarnish India’s image in international forums. A statement issued by the Ministry for Women and Child Development dismissed the index outright, claiming that it had serious methodological flaws: “Misinformation seems to be the hallmark of the annually released Global Hunger Index”.

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