We may be sending the Chandrayaan to the Moon, we may be projecting how through the Ujjwala Scheme and the Swachh Bharat Mission the woes of rural women have been addressed and how our nation is becoming sanitised, we may have recently gone to receive the iconic Rafale jet and shaken hands with US President Donald Trump- but the question really is, that despite all these achievements have we as a nation been able to put an end to malnutrition?
The truth is that a majority of our countrymen still live in hunger and our ranking on the Global Hunger Index is 102 among 117 counties across the world. The index has raised an alarming bell for the country and called its situation extremely serious.
The 117 countries that were ranked on a measurement index showed how much progress they had made over the years in targeting undernutrition and hunger and India does have an embarrassing score at that. The Global Hunger index calculates the levels of hunger worldwide and includes aspects like child stunting, child, child wasting and child mortality.
The Global Hunger Index shows that poverty and malnutrition are intimately linked to each other and unless we tackle poverty it will be very difficult for us to tackle hunger. According to the index, child wasting in India is at its highest rate(20.8%) while child stunting is at 37.9%- these are globally the indicators of worst health standards.
While it cannot be denied that India continues to pull the world down with its growing hunger and malnutrition, two of our neighbouring countries Bangladesh and Nepal have perfumed way better than us.
The fact that we rank 102 out of 117 countries across the world goes on to mean that there are only fifteen more countries in the world which are ranked even worse than us. Most of these fifteen remaining countries are African countries.
The leaders of the Opposition parties have referred to the GHI report and criticised the government and the prime minister.
