India slipped two spots on Global Hunger Index, 2010 compared to last year, according to the new report released by the International Food Policy research Institute (IFPRI) in New Delhi.

“India has been ranked 67 in 2010 - in 2009 the country was ranked at 65,” says the IFPRI release.

The government's failure to get the latest child malnourishment figures may have been to blame for India's dismal show, warns Purnima Menon, research fellow at IFPRI and co-author of the report.

"Most countries have updated their figures, while India still has to make do with the data available from 2004-06," she told Governance Now, "Although it is a small shift we should still be worried that we rank in the 60s.”    

IFPRI calculated India’s rank based on the data on undernourished children in 2004-06, which is the latest such data available in the country. "We don’t have the data for every year. It is more of a governance issue. Countries that take such issues seriously monitor it properly. Vietnam for example took nutrition very seriously and every year it conducts a survey and updates its figure,” Menon commented.

"India's poor rank may also be because of the fact that it accounts for a very large share of the world's under nourished children," she said, "India is not going to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) first goal: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by 2015."

The report released on Monday mentioned that India is home to 42 percent of the world’s underweight children and 31 percent of its stunted children.

The report by IFPRI contradicts the rosy growth story of India in terms of GDP. Last week, investment bank Credit Suisse reported that wealth has surged in India, tripling over the last decade. It also added that most Indians may almost double their assets over the next five years.
“Other reports may make us happy but this report at least this gives honest picture of India, which is not a rosy one,” Ashok Gulati, director, Asia – IFPRI told Governance Now.

Gulati added, “The fact is that we have growth story driven by services sector and industrial sector but agriculture sector is still limping. And majority of the poor are in agriculture. Unless we bring more growth for agriculture, the salvation of this country’s poor will never be here.”

“It is a big challenge for India. It needs to figure out which growth model is right - one which can reduce poverty level faster,” he said.

“Children in South Asia are worst off, partly because they start at a deficit; even at birth, many infants in South Asia are already stunted,” the report added.

The data for 2010 has focused on one of the components of the index, child malnutrition while other two categories are: child mortality rate, and the proportion of people who are calorie deficient.

With a score of 24.1, India is rank below its neighbours - China, Pakistan, Nepal - and some of the sub-Saharan African countries like Nigeria, Malawi and other Asian countries like North Korea.

The index ranks countries on a 100-point scale, with zero being the best score - no hunger - and 100 being the worst.

India's hunger situation has been placed in the orange category, tagged as "alarming" by the report. There are 25 countries in the orange category out of 84 surveyed by IFPRI, Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide.

According to the report, “Twenty-nine countries still have level of hunger that are ‘extremely alarming’ or ‘alarming’”.

“This year's hunger figure marked a nearly 10 per cent decline from the 2009 level, with the reduction concentrated in Asia, where 80 million fewer people are estimated to be going hungry this year,” the report noted.

“South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa continue to suffer from the highest levels of hunger, with regional scores of 22.9 and 21.7, respectively,” the report commented.

Read the report