Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.
Hunger is an emotive word. Most of us reading this are fortunate to have enough to eat. We
find the idea that the other people live in hunger deeply unsettling. Hence, it is also unsettling
that the well-publicised 2022 Global Hunger Index has ranked India at 107 out of 121
countries. It has ranked India behind North Korea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Rwanda, Nigeria and
Congo. This doesn’t seem to make much sense. But people don’t really like digging through
the actual reports and methodology. They read the headline and comment on that and move
on.
The GHI report is jointly released by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe, non-
government organisations from Ireland and Germany, respectively. Both are good
organisations with long and reputed track records. The report is a 60-page beautiful PDF
document, with its heart in the right place. The formatting and language are perfect. It has
beautiful pictures, such as of African farm women holding vegetables.
At the same time, its rankings are highly questionable. Four criteria are used to determine the
final index: prevalence of undernourishment, child stunting rate, child wasting rate, and child
mortality. Thus, three of the four criteria are related to children. Child stunting rate is defined
as the percentage of children that are two standard deviations below the reference height for
a 5-year-old. Child wasting rate is defined as the percentage of children that are two standard
deviations below the reference weight for a 5-year-old. The argument is that if our children are
not tall enough or do not weigh enough, it is an indicator of national hunger. It is in these
parameters that India scored poorly, hence the slippage in rank.
The GHI report takes India’s data from our own National Family Health Survey 2019-21. This
in turn is prepared by the health and family welfare ministry, by surveying a sizable sample of
over 61 lakh households. In this 700-plus page survey report also, there is data for India’s
child stunting and child wasting rates. It says 36% of Indian kids are stunted and 19% of the
children are wasted. These are some of the highest values in the world. Plug these into the
GHI criteria spreadsheet, India ranks low, behind even North Korea. We are a starving nation!
In which country is the organisation Welthungerhilfe based?