India has said that the Global Hunger Index is an “erroneous measure of hunger and suffers from serious methodological issues” after the country has been ranked 111 among 125 countries in the Global Hunger Report 2023. India was ranked in the 107th position in the 2022 Global Hunger Report.

The report is released by Concern Worldwide and Welt Hunger Hilfe, Non-Government Organisations from Ireland and Germany. 2023 Global Hunger Index gave India a score of 28.7 and stated that the level of hunger in the country was “serious”.

A press release from Ministry of Women and Child Development stated, “Three out of the four indicators used for calculation of the index are related to the health of children and cannot be representative of the entire population. The fourth and most important indicator ‘Proportion of Undernourished (PoU) population’ is based on an opinion poll conducted on a very small sample size of 3000.”

Download Nagaland Tribune app on Google Play

The Ministry said that the Government of India has prioritized several key activities to address the challenge of malnutrition under Mission Saksham Anganwadi and Poshan 2.0 (Mission Poshan 2.0) and that it has developed and deployed the ‘Poshan Tracker’ ICT Application as an important governance tool. It mentioned that Poshan Tracker, which has the measurement data of 7.24 Crore (72.4 Million) children, has consistently put the percentage of child wasting below 7.2%, month-on-month as compared to the value of 18.7% used for child wasting in the Global Hunger Index 2023.

Child wasting refers to a child who is too thin for his or her height and is the result of recent rapid weight loss or the failure to gain weight.

Several key international organizations such as UNICEF, WHO, and the World Bank have acknowledged the Poshan Tracker as a game-changer in the area of nutrition, the Ministry added.