TWELVE INDIAN provinces have worrying levels of hunger, with the situation "extremely alarming" in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, writes Rahul Bediin New Delhi.
The development comes at a time when the country is emerging as one of the world's fastest-growing economies.
The 2008 Global Hunger Indexreport, released yesterday by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute along with Welthungerhilfe and the University of California, warns that Madhya Pradesh's nutrition problems are comparable to those in Ethiopia and Chad. The report reveals that India has more than 200 million people suffering from hunger - a number greater than in any other country.
It also ranked India 66 out 88 countries on the global hunger index, taking into account three vital indicators: child malnutrition, rates of child mortality and the calorie-deficient population.
"Despite years of robust economic growth, India scored worse than nearly 25 sub-Saharan African countries and all of South Asia, except Bangladesh," the report noted.
The best-performing state was Punjab in the north but that too was afflicted by a "serious" hunger problem and measured up less well than developing countries like Gabon, Vietnam and Honduras.
Nutrition experts said India's abysmal record, despite self-sufficiency in food grains, is due to faulty, corrupt and bureaucratic distribution policies, insufficient access to food, poor feeding practices and poor childcare practices.
The recent spike in global food prices had further reduced the food-buying capacity of many poor families.
In addition, India's lower castes and specific ethnic minorities were discriminated against, pushing them further into impoverishment and starvation.
India's emphasis, in the early 1990s, on a market economy resulted after 2002 in an average annual growth rate of about 8 per cent.
Expansion was buoyed by a robust stock market, rising industrial output and escalating real estate prices. This resulted in western countries flocking to invest in India, further bolstering national economic growth. But the fruits of these achievements have remained confined to a handful of the nation's 1.2 billion people.
A study by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector revealed 77 per cent of the population exists on 20 Indian rupees (30 cent) a day.