Friday, 17 May, 2024
By: Sutanu Guru
In 2000, India had a hunger score that was “alarming” at 38.8. By 2012, it had improved significantly to 28.8 but remained in the serious category. Image Source: IANS
This second feature in the series analyses two aspects of the research methodology behind the Global Hunger Report that appear dubious, if not outright mischievous.
In the previous feature of this three-part series, India Tracker looked at some anecdotal and some hard data to analyse and argue why the Global Hunger Index 2022 is a hit job on India (ranked 107 out of 121 countries) either as a collateral damage or an intended victim.
This piece analyses two aspects of the research methodology used to compile the Global Hunger Index that appears dubious, if not outright mischievous. Many supporters of the current government have already dealt at length with the current methodology and how seemingly absurd it is to use it. At India Tracker, we chose to focus on hard data, instead of the rhetoric, so it is important to look at the methodology adopted.
Four parameters are used to arrive at what the Global Hunger Index describes as the ‘Hunger Score’. A score of 0 or 1 is the ideal and 100 is the worst possible. Child mortality (number of children dying before age 5) gets a weight of one third; child stunting (low height for age) and child wastage (low weight for height) each get a weight of one sixth while a ‘vague’ term called undernourishment (percentage of citizens who do not get adequate calories intake) gets a weight of one third. In effect, two thirds of the weightage is given to specific nutrition and mortality aspects of children under 5. How a relatively high child mortality rate means a majority of the adult population must be suffering from hunger pangs is a leap of faith that only the “intellectuals” behind the Global Hunger Index can answer. For that matter how child stunting and wastage are representative of the entire adult population is also another leap of faith that is inexplicable.
But as the chart above shows, India has displayed tremendous improvement in child mortality in this century. In 2000, India had a hunger score that was “alarming” at 38.8. By 2012, it had improved significantly to 28.8 but remained in the serious category. Since then, even though child mortality has continued to fall, the hunger score has improved only marginally in some years or even worsened, like in 2022. How?
The devil lies in the vague term ‘undernourishment’ that gets one third weight. According to the methodology described by the report, data on this parameter is taken from the Food & Agriculture Organisation. Most folks would miss the fine print but it is basically a statistically unsound sample survey of a few thousand Indians. So, child mortality, stunting and wastage have all improved in India between 2012 and 2022. Yet, thanks to ‘undernourishment’ the hunger score worsened to 29.1 from 28.8. Most objective observers would call that a hit job.
Source: https://www.globalhungerindex.org/methodology.html
There is worse as supporters of the current regime have not dug deeper. What the Global Hunger Report did in 2015 was to suddenly and arbitrarily shift goalposts. As mentioned earlier, dramatic improvements in child mortality between 2000 and 2012 led to a dramatic improvement in the ‘Hunger Score’. But it has stagnated since then. The vague undernourishment parameter was not enough after 2012 to drag up the hunger score for India so that the rankings keep gong down. Read what the Global Hunger Report itself admits about methodology: “Moreover, the methodology for calculating GHI scores has been revised in the past and may be revised again in the future. In 2015, for example, the GHI methodology was changed to include data on child stunting and wasting and to standardize the values (see Wiesmann et al. 2015). This change caused a major shift in the GHI scores, and the GHI Severity Scale was modified to reflect this shift. Since 2015, almost all countries have had much higher GHI scores compared with their scores from 2014 and earlier. This does not necessarily mean their hunger levels rose in 2015—the higher scores merely reflect the revision of the methodology". India is a unique country which shows poor performance in the two parameters child stunting and wastage. Till recently, starvation and civil war torn Ethiopia reported better performance (it is ranked higher than India in the 2022 report). Since India Tracker doesn’t have the scientific expertise, it wont even attempt to explain this mystery.
Yet, there is enough to suggest both from a common sense and data perspective that the Global Hunger Report is a hit job. In the next and concluding feature of this series, India Tracker will demonstrate how rapidly declining poverty levels and improved consumption of milk, eggs, poultry and vegetables this century doesn’t get reflected at all in the annual global hunger reports. So much for academic rigour and respect for data.
