Concern Worldwide & Welthungerhilfe

Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe are the two European humanitarian organizations that jointly compute and publish the annual Global Hunger Index (GHI), the peer-reviewed tool used to measure and track hunger at global, regional, and national levels. Concern Worldwide is an Irish international relief and development agency founded in 1968 in Dublin in response to the Biafran famine in Nigeria; it operates across more than two dozen of the world's poorest countries. Welthungerhilfe (German for "World Hunger Aid"), formally Deutsche Welthungerhilfe e.V., is a German NGO established in 1962 as the national committee of the FAO's Freedom from Hunger Campaign, headquartered in Bonn. The GHI was first published in 2006 by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); since 2007 Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide have co-published it, with IFPRI involved until 2018, after which the two NGOs assumed sole responsibility.

The GHI scores each country on a 100-point scale (0 = no hunger, 100 = worst) using four weighted component indicators: undernourishment (share of population with insufficient caloric intake, one-third weight), child stunting (low height-for-age, one-sixth), child wasting (low weight-for-height, one-sixth), and child mortality (under-five death rate, one-third). The severity bands are: low (≤9.9), moderate (10–19.9), serious (20–34.9), alarming (35–49.9), and extremely alarming (≥50). Drawing on data from the FAO, UNICEF, the WHO, and the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, the index is calculated for countries with sufficient data and explicitly aligns with Sustainable Development Goal 2 (Zero Hunger) under the UN's 2030 Agenda.

India's GHI ranking has been a recurring point of political controversy. In the 2024 GHI, India ranked 105th out of 127 countries with a score of 27.3, placing it in the "serious" category—below neighbours such as Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan in some recent editions. The Government of India, through the Ministry of Women and Child Development, has repeatedly contested the methodology, arguing that three of the four indicators are child-specific and that the undernourishment estimate rests on a small opinion-poll sample of roughly 3,000 respondents, calling the index an inaccurate measure of national hunger. The publishers maintain the index reflects multidimensional hunger and child nutrition standards endorsed by UN bodies.

For competitive examinations, this topic is overwhelmingly tested in current affairs and the social-development/reports-and-indices segments of the General Studies / general-knowledge papers (UPSC Prelims, CSS Current Affairs, BCS, Guokao general knowledge). The standard question angle asks candidates to identify the publishing organizations (Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe), the four component indicators and their weights, India's latest rank and score, and the government's methodological objections. Aspirants should distinguish the GHI from cognate indices—the FAO's State of Food Security report, the Global Nutrition Report, and the UNDP's Multidimensional Poverty Index—and remember the SDG-2 linkage, as MCQs frequently pair the publisher with the correct index in matching format.