The Global Hunger Index continues to be a erroneous measure of ‘hunger’ and does not reflect the country’s true position, the government said in a statement on Thursday as India ranked 111th out of 125 countries in the Global Hunger Index 2023.

The Global Hunger Report 2023 has been released by the Ireland non-profit Concern Worldwide and Germany’s Welt Hunger Hilfe.

In the index released on Thursday, India has a score of 28.7, indicating a serious level of hunger. The country came after neighbouring countries Pakistan (102nd), Bangladesh (81st), Nepal (69th) and Sri Lanka (60th). However, India fared better than South Asia and Africa South of the Sahara, which recorded a score of 27 each.

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“The index is an erroneous measure of hunger and suffers from serious methodological issues. 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 Women and Child Development Ministry said.

“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 3,000,” it said in the statement.

While the rate of undernourishment in India stood at 16.6 percent and under-five mortality at 3.1 percent, the prevalence of anaemia in women aged between 15 and 24 years stood at 58.1 percent.

As per the index, India also has the highest child-wasting rate in the world at 18.7 percent, reflecting acute undernutrition. Wasting is measured based on children’s weight relative to their height.

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India ranked 107th out of 121 countries in the 2022 edition of the Global Hunger Index (GHI), a tool for comprehensively measuring and tracking hunger at global, regional, and national levels.

The 2023 Global Hunger Index (GHI) shows that, after many years of advancement up to 2015, progress against hunger worldwide remains largely at a standstill. The 2023 GHI score for the world is 18.3, considered moderate and less than one point below the world’s 2015 GHI score of 19.1.

The GHI said the compounding impacts of climate change, conflicts, economic shocks, the global pandemic, and the Russia-Ukraine war have exacerbated social and economic inequalities and slowed or reversed previous progress in reducing hunger in many countries.

(With inputs from PTI)