In a country with a frenzied appetite for economic growth, hunger among the Indian poor this year is no different from what it was sixteen years back. The latest Global Hunger Index report puts India’s hunger management in the “alarming” category. However, the only solace is that hunger has fallen slightly in the recent years.

“India has lagged in improving its hunger index despite strong economic growth. After a small increase between 1996 and 2001, India’s GHI score fell only slightly and the latest GHI returned to about the 1996 level,” reads the report titled ‘The Challeneg of Hunger: Ensuring Sustainable Food Security under Land, Water and Energy Stresses’. The report, compiled by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), was released in Washington DC recently. According to the report, “In 1990, India’s GHI score as monitored by IFPRI was 30.3, which fell to 22.6 in 1996. But again rose to 24.2 in 2001 and stood at 22.9 in 2012, much closer to 1996 levels.” Three equally weighted indicators — undernourishment, number of underweight children and child mortality — are considered for calculating the hunger index.

The report indicates that high per capita income is associated with less hunger. However, in India’s case, even this proves counterintuitive. Bangladesh, a country with a lower per capita income, has managed hunger better. The authors of the report say, “Bangladesh has overtaken India on a range of social indicators, including how fast it has reduced child mortality.” “Between 1990 and 1996, India’s trend line moved in parallel with the predicted line, indicating that its GHI score was falling commensurate with economic growth. After 1996, however, the disparity between economic development and progress in the fight against hunger widened, and India moved further away from the predicted line,” the report notes, indicating that post-liberalisation, the accretion in wealth has only happened for the middle-class and the rich.

“In India, 43.5 percent of children less than five years of age are underweight, which accounts for almost two-thirds of the country’s alarmingly high GHI score,” the 60-page report highlights. The report, however, carries caveat — old data may also have affected the hunger index score of the country. The data has not been update for six years. “Government of India has failed to monitor national trends in child undernutrition for more than six years, any recent progress in the fight against child undernutrition cannot be taken into account by the 2012 GHI,” says the report. “Home to the majority of the world’s undernourished children, India is in dire need of monitoring systems for child undernutrition and related indicators that produce data at regular intervals, in order to improve program performance and scale up impact,” the authors point out.