What Does the Global Hunger Index Reveal About India’s Hunger Crisis?

Today I saw a news article titled “India at ‘severe’ hunger level? Global Hunger Index ranking angers Indian government,” reporting that the Global Hunger Index (GHI) placed India at a score of 29.1, classified as “severe” hunger, ranking 107th out of 121 countries, six places lower than the previous year.

Compared with its neighbours, India ranks only above Afghanistan (109) and below Nepal (81), Bangladesh (84) and Pakistan (99). After the release, India’s Ministry of Women and Child Development condemned the index as stigmatizing, claiming it is detached from reality and ignores the government’s food‑security efforts. The ministry also questioned the scientific basis of the index, noting that its most important indicator—population under‑nourishment—is based on a survey of only 3,000 people, and that the other three indicators (child wasting, stunting, and mortality) involve genetics, sanitation, and environment, which may not be suitable for measuring hunger.

I was also curious about my own country’s performance; the index shows that China is among the 17 best‑performing nations, which is encouraging.

Beyond the headline, the index is constructed in three steps, as shown on the official website:

The first step assigns values to the four component indicators for each country using the latest data from internationally recognised sources. The second step normalises each raw indicator value to a standardised score. The normalisation threshold is set slightly above the highest observed global value since 1988 (e.g., the highest observed under‑nourishment rate was 76.5 %, so the threshold is set at 80 %). For example, a country with a 40 % under‑nourishment rate receives a standardised score of 50, placing it between no under‑nourishment and the observed maximum. The third step aggregates the standardised scores, weighting under‑nourishment and child mortality each at one‑third of the total, and child wasting and stunting each at one‑sixth.

The resulting GHI score ranges from 0 (best, no hunger) to 100 (worst, all four adverse conditions at their thresholds). In practice, no country reaches either extreme.

According to the calculation, India falls into the “extreme warning” category, while China is in the “low hunger” category.

The evaluation process is clear and aligns with my intuition, though the rationale for the differing weights of the indicators is not explained. I plan to investigate the justification for these weights further. This index is essentially a composite evaluation model.

Beyond nutrition, composite indices such as university rankings, GDP, innovation indices, healthy‑city scores, and safety indices also provide valuable, intuitive perspectives on complex phenomena.

For readers interested in evaluation models, the full ranking list is provided in the original source.