Government failed to measure scale of hunger to tailor its responses: Experts (The Hindu)

The Hindu published an article in its “national” section stating that while the Government has launched a scathing attack against the publishers of the Global Hunger Index for India’s poor ranking, experts argue that not only were steps taken by the Government to check rising levels of hunger in a pandemic year inadequate, it also failed to measure the scale of hunger to tailor its responses. Senior research fellow, Purnima Menon said, “I think what was promising was that nutrition was at a high point in terms of political agenda and visibility before the pandemic hit. In the minds of frontline workers and everyone else, the idea that you need to continue to do things for nutrition was helped by the fact that pre-pandemic it was a strong agenda system-wide. There was a response from the Government too, be it food allocation from the Centre or more nuanced State government responses. But we don’t know whether that was adequate or inadequate. And the only way to know is to relentlessly measure to determine who is hungry, what is the nature and depth of food insecurity, what is it that people want, etc? What we need are population-wide rapid surveys and to make such data available in the public domain.”