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Saturday, July 10, 2010

Hunger: India worse off than Uganda!


There are now one billion hungry people on the globe, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said recently.
A statistic that is shameful and shocking at the same time. The global financial crisis too has led to a dramatic rise in hunger across the world.
"This day, more than 17,000 children will die of hunger. One every five seconds! The world has more than enough food. Yet, today, more than one billion people are hungry," he said.
The Global Hunger Index measures global hunger by ranking countries on three leading indicators and combining them into one index. The three indicators are prevalence of child malnutrition, rates of child mortality, and the proportion of people who are calorie deficient.
According to the 2009 Global Hunger Index, India ranks 65th out of 88 countries, with a hunger rate of 23.9. Countries like Uganda (38th); Mauritania (40th); Zimbabwe (58th) and many others have a better record than India on this front.
Almost 21 per cent of the Indian population was undernourished (between 2003 and 2005), 43.5 per cent Indian children under the age of five were underweight (between 2002 and 2007) and the under five-year-age infant mortality rate in 2007 was 7.2 per cent.
Even war-torn nations have managed to combat the scourge of hunger quite well, while India -- even though it boasts of being the second fastest growing economy in the world -- languishes far behind and millions in the country go hungry.
Policy makers rather than raising prices should try and rise up in this index to the top and I am sure every Indian that day will work on a sunday to compensate FICCI for their estimated loss of Rs. 13,000 crores and Rs. 10,000 crores that of ASSOCHAM.

Let us look around and not go anyone stomach around us.


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