The International Food Policy Research Institute’s (IFPRI) Global Hunger Index has rated India as a country with ‘serious’ hunger levels in 2016, ranking it 97 out of 118 countries. The report puts India behind Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, but ahead of Pakistan and three other Asian countries. India was ranked 80 out of 104 countries in 2015.
IFPRI said that 15.2% of the country’s citizens are malnourished, with 38.7% of children under five years being stunted (growth restriction) because of lack of food. Although the country has seen improvement in its GHI score since the 1990s where over 60% of children were stunted, its current score of 28.5 is still worse than the developing nation average score of 21.3.
IFPRI combines four indicators – proportion of the undernourished in the population, prevalence of wasting in children under five years, prevalence of stunting in children under five years and the under-five mortality rate. – to form the GHI.
