India fares badly on global hunger index

NEW DELHI: The war-ravaged countries of Serbia and Lithuania are better off. So are people in cold deserts of Mongolia. Tiny nations such as Surinam and Honduras have got a better handle on it and so have large diverse countries like China and Brazil. India, in comparison, is failing miserably to tackle hunger.
India ranks 66 out of 88 countries on the 2008 Global Hunger Index (GHI), far behind comparable developing countries as well as smaller, less diverse and resource deprived nations.
The index, released by the International Food Policy Research Institute on Tuesday, is bound to take the
hype out of UPA's talk of inclusive growth, with a review of Indian states showing that economic progress witnessed in some states has not helped improve hunger and malnutrition levels.
Even Punjab, the food bowl and the best performing state within India, came off worse than countries like Gabon and Vietnam when measured on the index.
Out of the 17 states that researchers measured on the index, Madhya Pradesh came up worst. Compared internationally, it could not measure up to even strife-torn countries of Africa such as Congo, Rwanda and Sudan.
It was marked as facing an "extremely alarming" hunger crisis.
Appallingly, 12 of the 18 states measured, including, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, have been marked as facing an "alarming" situation. Not one state was performing well enough to be taken off the danger list.
The index has reiterated that despite being a much ahead of sub-Saharan African countries in economic prowess, India stands lower than many of them when it comes to fighting hunger.
The index was based on an average of three leading indicators ��� prevalence of child malnutrition, rates of child mortality and the proportion of people who are calorie deficient. Researchers used data from NSSO and the National Family Health Survey III.
Collating data, researchers found that India performed badly in the index primarily because of high malnutrition in children and consequent underweight children below the age of 5.
Almost 60% of the children in Madhya Pradesh below the age of 5 were underweight, the authors calculated. In Bihar, they computed 56.1% to be malnourished. Punjab might be the grain bank of north India but almost one-fourth of its children below the age of 5 were found to be underweight.