‘Centre not ready…’: CPI(M) hits out at govt's response on Global Hunger Index ranking
According to the CPI(M) leader, all 121 countries agreed to the figures, but India did not because it showed a decline.
Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Sitaram Yechury on Sunday hit out at the Narendra Modi-led central government over its response to India's ranking in the Global Hunger Index.
Stating that the Centre is “not ready to accept any international figures”, Yechury said the country is “declining at every level”. According to the CPI(M) leader, all 121 countries agreed to the figures, but India did not because it showed a decline.
“The present government is not ready to accept any international figures. The country is declining at every level. Look at the economic scale, unemployment or even the kind of propaganda that is going on in the form of politics of violence, there is an atmosphere of fear, and there is a decline in every area,” the CPI(M) general secretary told news agency ANI.
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“It is known that crores of people have become poor who were not poor before Covid-19, but instead of giving relief to them, the Centre is busy giving tax-relief and waiving loans to the rich,” Yechury further said.
The Centre on Saturday rejected the Global Hunger Index 2022 report which ranked India at the 107th position among 121 countries with its child-wasting rate at 19.3 per cent - the highest in the world. In a statement, the ministry of women and child development said the index is an “erroneous measure of hunger” and suffers from “serious methodological issues”.
“Three out of the four indicators used for 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 Undernourished (PoU) population is based on an opinion poll conducted on a very small sample size of 3,000,” the ministry said.
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It added, “A consistent effort is yet again visible to taint India’s image as a nation that does not fulfill the food security and nutritional requirements of its population. Misinformation seems to be the hallmark of the annually released Global Hunger Index.”
(With inputs from ANI)
