INDIA’S HUNGER
RSS body demands action against Global Hunger Index surveyors for ‘defaming India’
The Swadeshi Jagran Manch urged the Centre to take steps against a German NGO which ranked India 107th among 121 countries on the index.
The Swadeshi Jagran Manch, an affiliate body of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh on Sunday urged the Union government to take action against German non-governmental organisation Welt Hunger Hilfe which last week ranked India 107th among 121 countries in the Global Hunger Index, PTI reported.
The index has been prepared in an irresponsible manner to defame India, the Swadeshi Jagran Manch claimed in a statement. Ashwani Mahajan, the co-convenor of the body said that India was self-sufficient in food grains and a net exporter country.
In the Global Hunger Index released on Friday, India fared worse than its neighbours Pakistan (99th), Nepal (81st) and Bangladesh (84th) for the second successive year. In 2021, India was ranked 101st out of 116 countries on the index that calculates the hunger levels and malnutrition across the world.
This year, India had the highest child wasting rate in the world of 19.3%. Child wasting rate – one of the four indicators of the index – refers to the share of children under the age of five who are underweight for their height.
However, a day after the report was published, the central government on Saturday alleged that the Global Hunger Index is a part of a consistent effort to taint India’s image as “a nation that does not fulfil the food security and nutritional requirements of its population”.
The Ministry of Women and Child Development said that the most important indicator estimate of the study – the Proportion of Undernourished [PoU] population – was based on an opinion poll conducted on a “very small sample size” of 3,000.
On Sunday, the Swadesi Jagran Manch also spoke on similar lines and demanded that the Union government take action against those who prepared the report for defaming India by spreading falsehood about the country’s food security, PTI reported.
‘Till when will BJP-RSS weaken India’: Rahul Gandhi
Meanwhile, Congress MP Rahul Gandhi accused the RSS and the Bharatiya Janata Party of weakening India by obfuscating reality.
“India ranked 107th out of 121 countries in terms of hunger and malnutrition,” he wrote in a tweet on Sunday. “The prime minister and his colleagues will now say ‘hunger isn’t on the rise in India, but citizens in other countries aren’t feeling hungry’.”
His comment was an apparent jibe at Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman who, while responding to a question on the depreciation of rupee on Saturday, said that the domestic currency was not weakening but the dollar was strengthening instead.
Gandhi added, “For how long will RSS-BJP work to weaken India by misleading the public from reality?”
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