The Global Hunger Index (GHI) for 2022 has just come out, which shows India occupying the 107th position among the 121 countries for which the index is prepared (countries, where hunger is not a noteworthy problem, are left out of the index). India’s score on the hunger index is 29.1 which is worse than the score of 28.2 it had in 2014. (The lower the figure the less is hunger). One is so bombarded these days by official talk about India being among the fastest growing economies of the world, India within sight of becoming a USD 5 trillion economy, and India being an emerging economic power, that news such as the GHI brings one down to earth. Ironically, the only country in South Asia that is below India on the hunger index, and that too only marginally, is war-ravaged Afghanistan (rank 109); the rank of crisis-hit Sri Lanka is 64, Nepal 81, Bangladesh 84 and Pakistan 99.
The evidence of secularly growing hunger in the neo-liberal period is quite overwhelming. If we take 1993-94 and 2011-12, the first an NSS ‘large sample’ year closest to the beginning of neo-liberalism, and the second the last NSS ‘large sample’ year for which data have been released by the Government, we find that the proportion of the population below 2,200 calories per person per day in rural India increased from 58 to 68 percent; the corresponding figures for urban India where the benchmark was 2,100 calories per person per day increased from 57 to 65 percent. The figures for 2017-18, another NSS ‘large sample’ year, were apparently so appalling that the Government decided to suppress them altogether, and even discontinue the NSS in the old form. But leaked data show that per capita real expenditure for rural India as a whole had fallen by 9 percent between 2011-12 and 2017-18. There is however a powerful view among many researchers that this apparently growing incidence of hunger should not be taken as evidence of people becoming worse off over time.
On both these counts according to them, the decline in per capita foodgrain absorption is symptomatic not of a worsening living standard as of an improvement in living standard; hence to draw conclusions about growing poverty from what appears at first sight as growing hunger (but in fact is a voluntary reduction of foodgrain consumption as part of a better life), is entirely illegitimate. The reason why poverty according to official and World Bank estimates appears to have declined in India, on the basis of which it is claimed that the link between poverty and hunger no longer holds, is because they use a ‘poverty line’, a particular level of per capita money expenditure below which people are considered poor, which is updated by using a cost-of-living index. But the index as constructed in India does not reckon with the rise in the cost of living owing to the privatisation of services like Education and Health. Therefore, the true rise in the cost of living is not taken into account, and the poverty line that is updated by using it keeps falling below what it should have been. This underestimates the magnitude of poverty and the elite laps up this estimated, supposedly declining, poverty ratio. The Global Hunger Index exposes the falsity of such poverty estimates.
