View: India needn't worry about indicators like GHI

The Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2021 finds India seven positions down to 101st from 94th last year, ranking lower than neighbours like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. This has added to anxieties - and suspicions - in India's policy circles.'Hunger' comprises the prevailing calorie undernourishment in a population, the extent of child stunting and wasting, along with the levels of child mortality. Such a combination of indicators has its inherent contradictions between calorimetric and anthropometric assessments of undernourishment. Early-age mortality, for instance, has far less to do with stunting and wasting, and more with compromises in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) practices and incomplete immunisation. But even though stunting and wasting are not life-threatening, they do have long-term effects that compromise reaching healthy adulthood and one's life potential.While the purpose of an index is to position a set of units in a comparative hierarchy of best to worst, the aggregation of multiple dimensions needs to be sensitive, in terms of their implications and mutual substitution. Aggregating population undernourishment, child undernourishment and child survival on equal footing, as GHI does, dilutes these three aspects and their interconnectedness to the extent that it cannot qualify to represent hunger, or deprivation, in the right sense of those terms.Also, the simplistic aggregation in terms of an average does not contest mutual substitution - improvement in one being possible to be substituted with the deterioration in another. For example, between the 2005-06 National Family Health Survey (NFHS) and 2015-16 NFHS, the proportion of under-5 children reported as stunted (height-for-age) declined from 48% to 38.4% over 10 years. But the proportion of children under 5 reported as wasted (weight-for-height) increased from 19.8% to 21% in the same period.The GHI uses both these indicators for its calculation. India has improved in terms of height, but not weight. Similar data are not available for India as a country from the 2019-20 NFHS 5, but are available separately for 22 states and Union territories (UTs).Global indices with indicators in terms of percentages overlook the absolute magnitude of the adversity as well as the base levels from where change is realised. GHI includes populous Asian countries as well as sparsely populated European nations. In such a situation, a comparison should not overlook the magnitude - that is, the population, absolute number of children, etc. But noting the transition taking place from a particular level to another sheds more light.Therefore, the global value of GHI - 17.9 - is placed with a positively skewed distribution of these index values across countries. Also not highlighted is the extent to which betterment in this index value is experienced across countries, despite being ranked at the same level or even at lower ranks.This ordinal valuation of ranking often masks the kind of changes taking place, which may be gradual and in the right direction. The simplistic normalisation of considered indicators in terms of a ratio to the ideal, and their arbitrary weightage in aggregation, makes GHI less robust for inter-national comparisons.Accounting for 17.7% of the global population and one-sixth of child births in the world, India, with its four considered indicators, is not badly placed in terms of their levels and progression. The hunger index value has shifted more than 10 units in two decades, a factor crucial to the improvement of the global index value. So, the interpretation of progress towards an ideal of a zero hunger index value should be with equivalence of progress made by India vis-a-vis other countries. The pace of progress realised in India will make the world index value shift faster in due course.Considering that India has 28 states and eight UTs, it is not particularly important for the country to worry too much about global indices such as GHI. 2019-20 NFHS has produced two GHI indicators - stunted and wasted among under-5 - for 22 states and UTs. Among these, eight states and UTs have shown improvement in both indicators, and 14 states have shown deterioration. The lowest proportion of stunted children was found in Sikkim (22.3%), the highest in Meghalaya (46.5%). On the other hand, the lowest proportion of wasted children was found in Mizoram (9.8), the highest in Maharashtra (25.6%).Ranking countries, as in GHI, is perfectly acceptable. But its purpose goes unserved unless qualified by robust measurement in which simplicity does not outweigh adequacy.Rajan is chairman, International Institute of Migration and Development (IIMAD), Thiruvananthapuram, and Mishra is professor, Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram

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