TOP 20 THINGS TO BE KEPT IN MIND REGARDING GHI

1. India has been ranked 67, much lower than neighbouring China, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal in the 2010 Global Hunger Index (GHI) Report released on Monday by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a United States-based policy think tank.
2. The biggest contributor to the GHI is child under-nutrition, which accounts for almost half the score.
3. Deep inequalities have resulted in India slipping from 65 {+t} {+h} position last year to 67 this year, despite an economic growth rate of about 8.5 per cent.
4. “Unlike in China, higher growth rate in India has not translated into hunger reduction,” IFPRI Director Ashok Gulati told journalists after the release of “2010 Global Hunger Index — The Challenge of Hunger: Focus on the Crisis of Child Under-Nutrition.”
5. The report was prepared in collaboration with the German Group, Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide.
6. China is ranked at the ninth position, Myanmar is placed at number 50, Pakistan at 52 and Nepal, at 56, while Bangladesh is placed at 68, just behind India. India is placed in the ‘alarming' category, a notch lower than the ‘extremely alarming' bracket.
7. The GHI rated 122 countries on the basis of three equally weighted indicators — prevalence of child mortality rate, under-weight children below five, and the proportion of undernourished (caloric deficient) people.
8. It advises governments to make nutrition, especially for young children during the first 1,000 days, a political priority. “After the age of two years, the negative effects of under-nutrition are largely irreversible,” the report observed.
9. This year's GHI reflects data from 2003-08, said to be the most recent available global data.
10. Broadly, the data on child mortality are for 2008 (UNICEF, 2009), the statistics on child underweight are from 2003-08 for which latest data is available (WHO, UNICEF etc.), while the data on proportion of under-nourished are for 2004-06 (FAO, 2009).
11. Reason for low ranking
12. The reason given for India's low ranking was that it was not investing as much as its neighbours in basic indicators such as health, water, sanitation, education and women's social status.
13. Because of the country's large population, India is home to 42 per cent of the world's under-weight children.
14. Whereas China has gone all out for a “bottoms-up, multi-targeted” and agriculture reforms approach, Pakistan has lesser underweight children because of the large meat-eating population.
15. Sri Lanka was way ahead of India in women's literacy and its programmes on the ground were comparable with those in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
16. “In South Asia, the low nutritional, educational and social status of women is among the major factors that contribute to a high prevalence of malnutrition in children under five,” the report said.
17. “The health of women, specifically mothers, is crucial to reducing child malnutrition. Mothers who are poorly nourished as girls tend to give birth to under-weight babies perpetuating the cycle of malnutrition,” it further stated.
18. According to Dr. Gulati, one per cent farm growth is two to three times more effective in tackling hunger. “But India's growth story starts from top-down — the IT and telecom sector. Agriculture is still waiting for reforms, that is coming piecemeal.”
19. The report said that in recent years, the number of hungry people had actually been increasing.
20. In 2009, on the heels of a global food price crisis and in the midst of worldwide recession, the number of undernourished peopled surpassed one billion, although recent estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization suggest that the number will have dropped to 925 million in 2010.
21. However, Purnima Menon, a research fellow with IFPRI, said the impact of global hike in food prices on hunger and poverty have not been studied.
22. Dependent as the IFPRI is on the data provided by WHO, UNICEF and other such agencies to arrive at GHI, Ms. Menon admitted to “limitations of limited data.”