India is the country with largest number of people who face chronic hunger and are unable to consume even minimum dietary energy that is required given their age, body mass and activity level. This paper estimates that, in 2011-12, 39 per cent of the Indian population – a staggering 472 million people – faced chronic hunger and were unable to consume even minimally adequate amount of food.
Prevalence of undernourishment, a measure developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization, is a key indicator for global hunger and food insecurity targets. The FAO has developed a sound conceptual model for estimating the prevalence of dietary energy deficiency. This paper addresses some of the major criticisms of FAO’s methodology of estimation of Prevalence of Undernourishment. It introduces significant improvements in the methods of estimation of the distribution of average calorie intake and average minimum dietary energy requirements. In particular, it suggests a new method for accounting for out of home consumption of food and a new method for calibrating estimates of dietary energy requirements to variations in physical activity levels associated with different occupations. The paper brings together data from NSSO’s Consumption Survey, NSSO’s Employment Unemployment Survey, the National Family Health Survey and the surveys conducted by the National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau to estimate Prevalence of Undernourishment for India as a whole and for Indian States.
The full paper is here.
Recommended citation:
Rawal, Vikas, Bansal, Vaishali and Bansal, Prachi (2019), “Prevalence of Undernourishment in Indian States: Explorations Based on NSS 68th Round Data”, Economic and Political Weekly, vol LIV no 15, April 13, pp. 35-45 (available at: https://www.epw.in/system/files/pdf/2019_54/15/SA_LIV_15_130419_Vikas_Rawal.pdf).