Amidst all the brouhaha of Jay Shah’s business practices and high voltage politicking in the capital, comes the mind-numbing news that India’s hunger problem is more than serious; and that we have been ranked No. 100 among 119 nations on the Global Hunger Index (GHI) — behind North Korea and Iraq. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which puts the data and research together for the annual ranking, said India had slipped 3 levels since last year from 97th, and with only Pakistan and Afghanistan producing worse results in Asia.
For comparison, our neighbours are way ahead – China (ranked 29), Nepal (72), Myanmar (77), Sri Lanka (84) and Bangladesh (88). The Hunger Index is a reflection of the level of poverty and malnourishment a country suffers from. India’s poor performance should have set off alarm bells, considering that our fall since 2014 is a dramatic 45 points in 3 years — down from 55th to 100th rank. However, reactions from officialdom have been rather muted so far.The key factors assessed for the ‘hunger’ rankings are: the level of undernourishment, child mortality, child wasting and child stunting.
Poverty and hunger
It is not a pretty picture. In India, malnourishment has ensured 44 per cent of the children under the age of five are underweight and 72 percent of infants and 52 per cent of married women have anaemia. Children born with diseases or suffering from stunted growth are a direct result of the malnutrition suffered by their mothers during pregnancy.Studies have also shown that areas where education and literacy of women is low or where women marry early and are not allowed into decision-making, children are not fed the appropriate diet resulting in malnourishment even where there is adequate supply of food.
The poor ‘hunger’ ranking is also a reflection of our performance in tackling poverty. There is an obvious correlation between extreme poverty and malnourishment. In calculating India’s multi-dimensional poverty index, poor nutrition was the largest contributor — at 31 percent — compared to lack of drinking water – just 2 percent and electricity just 4.1 percent.This is not to say that there is no effort to reverse the situation. IndiaSpend.org notes India halved its poverty head count ratio – reducing the numbers below the poverty line from 47 percent in 1990 to 21 percent in 2011 (those spending less than Rs 27.2 per day in rural areas and Rs 33 per day in an urban area are considered ‘below poverty line’). India has also reduced the number of stunted children by 9.6 per cent between 2005 and 2011. But this is not enough.
Poor spends on health
The country is just not spending enough on improving the health and physical well-being of its people. At the beginning of this year, the Economic Survey noted that just around Rs 37,000 crore or just a little over 1 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was ploughed into public health. In a scathing attack on the government’s social development policy, the Economic Survey noted: “Given the pressing need to redistribute, India did not invest sufficiently in human capital - for instance, public spending on health was an unusually low 0.22 per cent of the GDP in 1950-51. This has risen to a little over 1 per cent today, but well below the world average of 5.99 per cent.” For the more sensitive social democracies of Europe, ‘health’ is even more important. In 2015, for the European Union, expenditure on health remained the second largest item of government expenditure after expenditure on ‘social protection’, amounting to 7.2 percent of GDP.
With all its faults, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act has worked well. Brought into effect in 2006, it guarantees a minimum of 100 days of paid, unskilled work during off-peak agricultural seasons. A national study in 2011 showed the programme had been directly responsible for preventing 14 million people from falling into poverty in that year, according to IndiaSpend.org. MGNREGA has to be broadened and intensified, especially in areas hit by drought.
Besides this, investing in education and direct intervention from the stage of pregnancy till children reach the secondary stage of school is a crying necessity. What we have today is mere tokenism. Mother-and-child programmes to provide guidance and nutrition have to be intensified on a war footing. It is quixotic and shameful to find ‘hunger’ still an unsolved problem on our 21st Century agenda.
Not something to be proud of
India’s poor performance should have set off alarm bells, considering that our fall since 2014 is a dramatic 45 points in 3 years – down from 55th to 100th rank
(The author can be contacted at gurbir1@gmail.com)