GS Paper 2
Syllabus: Issues relating to Poverty and Hunger
Source: ET
Context: According to the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM), India’s poor performance on specific international indicators despite rising per capita income is due to methodological issues.
Socio-development indicators where systematic biases exist:
- Childhood Stunting,
- Female Labour Force Participation Rate and
- Life Expectancy
The impact of methodological issues:
- Conceptual ambiguity, flawed benchmarks and shoddy methodology → flawed estimation → overestimating the level of deprivation.
- The growing use of Environment Social and Governance (ESG) norms in investment and trade decisions will mean that real-world decision-making will be increasingly impacted by biased data.
What aggravates the problem?
- The Indian statistical authorities do not publish accurate data on a regular basis.
- For example, the registrar general of India (RGI) publishes life expectancy estimates every year. However, the official estimates for 2019 were released in July 2022 by RGI.
Case study:
- The global hunger index (GHI) of FAO captures three dimensions of hunger: insufficient availability of food, shortfalls in the nutritional status of children and child mortality (which is mainly attributable to undernutrition).
- The 2022 index has ranked India at 107 among 121 countries.
- According to the Indian government, the index is an erroneous measure of hunger and suffers from serious methodological issues.
- Three out of the four indicators used for the calculation of the index are related to the health of Children and cannot be representative of the entire population.
- The fourth and most important indicator estimate of the Proportion of the Undernourished (PoU) population is based on an opinion poll conducted on a very small sample size of 3000.
Recommendations:
- To counter the global mismatches, Indian statistical authorities must publish their own estimates proactively.
- In order to be on time, this can be done based even on partial data, which can be updated later. This is done in the case of GDP.
Insta Links:
Global Hunger Index
Mains Links:
Despite the Consistent experience of High growth, India still goes with the lowest indicators of human development. Examine the issues that make balanced and inclusive development elusive. (UPSC 2019)