Measuring Hunger & Malnutrition

By way of international comparisons, there are two primary means of measuring India’s position in terms of hunger and nutrition. First, the Prevalence of Undernourishment (PoU), which measures overall hunger in the country; the second is the Prevalence of Underweight Children under five years of age, which is monitored by UNICEF. Both these feed into what is known as the Global Hunger Index, in which 12 of the 29 Indian states fall in the ‘alarming’ category.

• India has its own initiatives, too, such as the Integrated Child Development Service (ICDS), the National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau (NNMB) as well as ministries dedicated to ascertain the ground realities of these issues and in turn design policies that can solve discrepancies.
• These institutions and programmes, measure hunger and nutrition through various surveys and studies, including data acquired from nationally representative surveys such as the National Family Health Surveys (NFHS) and National Sample Surveys (NSS).

The following are some of the key national surveys by which nutrition and hunger data are gathered:

• Surveys of the National Sample Survey Organisation (data on food consumption)
• Surveys on Micronutrients conducted by the National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau (NNMB)
• District Level Household and Facility Surveys (DLHS)
• Annual Health Surveys (AHS)
• National Family Health Survey (NFHS)
• Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS)
• HUNGaMA (Hunger and Malnutrition) Survey
• Rapid Survey on Children (RSOC)

Shortcomings

• None of the national health and nutrition surveys of India include internationally accepted indicators on access to food and food security.
• While some gaps have been addressed, other new challenges in data capture have arisen given that hunger and nutrition are now a goal by themselves.
• Moreover, the challenge ahead for the Indian government in capturing a more holistic perspective of the hunger and nutrition problem in the country is to incorporate a larger base of topics and indicators.
• For example, while nutrition is an indicator that is widely studied through various surveys, hunger and food intake indicators are rare.
• In fact, the question of hunger and food intake is studied only by one question in the NSS and ignored in many of the other nutritional surveys in India.
• The separation of hunger and nutrition goals from the larger goal of poverty reduction as done in the MDGs, will require new methods by which target populations will need to be identified.
• Without proper identification of people, based on various indicators surrounding health and nutrition such as income, daily diet, calorie intake, height, and weight, policy design and intervention will prove more difficult.
• Identification is key to assess how many people in the country suffer from issues of hunger and malnutrition and this puts policymakers in a better position to reduce these numbers.
• Some of the issues are being partially addressed by NFHS-4, with an enhanced sample size that will enable the realisation of district-level indicators for nutrition.
• Also, from this round onwards, NFHS will be conducted once in every three years. One of the main objectives of the DLHS and AHS was to give policymakers district-level indicators, and since NFHS now addresses this aspect, they have been discontinued.