India
continues to remain below neighbours Bangladesh, Pakistan and others in the Global
Hunger Index as it ranked 94 among 107 nations in the 2020 list, falling in the
‘serious’ hunger category, reported PTI.

Experts
blamed India’s poor implementation of schemes, lack of effective monitoring, soiled
approach in tackling widespread ailments such as malnutrition and lax in performance
by large states behind its low ranking.

In the 2019
rankings, India was at 102 out of 117 countries.

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India’s
neighbours Bangladesh, Pakistan and Myanmar are in the ‘serious’ category as
well, although they are ranked higher than India in this year’s index. Bangladesh
ranked 75, while Myanmar and Pakistan were placed at 78 and 88, respectively.

Nepal and
Sri Lanka ranked 73 and 64, respectively and fell in the ‘moderate’ hunger
category.

According
to the report, 17 nations, including China, Belarus, Turkey, Cuba and Kuwait
were jointly at the top with a GHI score below five.  

14% of India’s population is undernourished, the report suggested. It also stated
that India recorded 37.4% stunting rate among children below the age of
five, along with a 17.3% wasting rate.  

The country
also has a 3.7% mortality rate among children under the age of five.

Stunting is
a phenomenon where children have below-average height for their age, while
wasting means children who have low weight for their age. Both conditions
reflect severe undernutrition.

Data from 1991 through 2014 for Bangladesh,
India, Nepal, and Pakistan showed that stunting is concentrated among children
from households facing multiple forms of deprivation, including poor dietary
diversity, low levels of maternal education, and household poverty.

During this
period, India experienced a decline in under-five mortality, driven largely by
a decrease in deaths from birth asphyxia or trauma, neonatal infections,
pneumonia, and diarrhoea, the report stated.

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“However,
child mortality, caused by prematurity and low birth weight, increased
particularly in poorer states and rural areas. Prevention of prematurity and
low birthweight is identified as a key factor with the potential to reduce
under-five mortality in India, through actions such as better antenatal care,
education, and nutrition as well as reductions in anaemia and oral tobacco
use,” it said.

Experts
think that poor implementation processes, lack of effective monitoring and
siloed approaches to tackling malnutrition often result in poor nutrition
indices.

Purnima
Menon, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research
Institute, New Delhi, said the performance of large states like Uttar Pradesh,
Bihar and Madhya Pradesh need to be improved to see an overall change of
India’s ranking.

“The
national average is affected a lot by the states like UP and Bihar, the
states which actually have a combination of high levels of malnutrition and
they contribute a lot to the population of the country,” said Menon.

“Every
fifth child born in India is in Uttar Pradesh. So if you have a high level of
malnutrition in a state that has a high population, it contributes a lot to
India’s average. Obviously, then, India’s average will be slow to move,”
she told PTI.

Menon said
big states with large population and a high burden of malnutrition are those
which are actually affecting India’s average.

“So,
if we want a change in India then we would also need a change in Uttar Pradesh,
Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar,” she said.

Shweta
Khandelwal, the head of Nutrition Research and Additional Professor at Public
Health Foundation of India, said the country has one of the most impressive
portfolios of programmes and policies in nutrition in the books.

“However,
the ground realities are quite dismal.”

“Research shows that our
top-down approach, poor implementation processes, lack of effective monitoring
and siloed approaches in tackling malnutrition (missing convergence) often
result in poor nutrition indices. We must integrate actions to make public
health and nutrition a priority across each sector,” she told PTI.

Khandelwal
suggested five measures to prevent exacerbation of hunger because of the
pandemic.

“Safeguard
and promote access to nutritious, safe and affordable diets; invest in
improving maternal and child nutrition through pregnancy, infancy, and early
childhood; re-activate and scale-up services for the early detection and
treatment of child wasting; maintain the provision of nutritious and safe
school meals for vulnerable children and expand social protection to safeguard
access to nutritious diets and essential service,” she said.

She said it
is important to aim at curbing multiple forms of malnutrition holistically in a
concerted manner rather than single short-sighted fixes.

“Hunger
and undernutrition cannot and should not be fixed by mere calorie provision.
All stakeholders steered by robust leadership must pay attention to making
balanced healthy diets which are climate-friendly, affordable and accessible to
all,” she added.

Also Read: Additional 6.7 million children under 5 could suffer from wasting due to COVID-19: UNICEF

GHI score
is calculated on four indicators — undernourishment; child wasting, the share
of children under the age of five who are wasted– who have low weight for
their height reflecting acute undernutrition); child stunting, children under
the age of five who have low height for their age reflecting chronic
undernutrition; and child mortality — the mortality rate of children under the
age of five.