200. Data released by Foreign Institutions is a joke

In 2015, a friend staying in California wrote in an email that he was just watching a show by TV host and comedian John Oliver, who stunned him with some brutal statistics. 

Oliver read out figures most Americans were unaware of: “The world's largest economy wastes as much as $165 billion (Rs 10.49 lakh crore at that time) worth of food every year. The amount of food wasted is enough to fill 730 football stadiums. On top of that, almost 50 million people, or about one-sixth of its population, live in food-insecure households.”

These numbers were indeed alarming. In this regard, the story was no different in India, Asia's third-largest economy, where moneybags from around the world were coming to invest because returns were expected to be very high. 

Astonishingly, my friend in the same email also informed me that Oliver said, which of course surprised him, 'India also wastes an insane amount of food.'

I remember that when a member of Parliament asked a question on this matter, the then Union Agriculture and Food Processing Minister, Sharad Pawar, in a written statement, said that India wasted as much as 40 percent of its total food produce annually as of 2013, and that setting up more large cold storages and better post-harvesting facilities alone could curtail wastage. He also stated that the waste of fruits and vegetables alone was estimated at 13,300 crore.

And this was just the beginning of a long list of grim numbers: Each year, due to negligence by the concerned departments and improper storage in government warehouses, about 21 million metric tons of wheat, almost equal to Australia's production, rotted in India. If the total value of this waste were calculated, it would come to around 58,000 crore, a mind-boggling amount.

But those were the days when a rudderless government with no vision was running the country.
It is 2025, and foreign agencies still put India in the same bracket after 10 years.

According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), a United Nations program, things remain the same.

Its recent reports prepared by vested interests, India's performance on the Global Hunger Index (GHI) has shown significant, long-term improvement, but its ranking has fallen in recent years due to changing methodologies and worsening indicators, ranking 105th out of 127 countries in 2024 and 102nd out of 123 in 2025. 

While older reports sometimes placed India around 55th (out of fewer countries), recent, more comprehensive assessments have consistently ranked it lower, such as 107th out of 121 in 2022.

On one hand, the report notes significant improvements, yet India's score is still classified as "serious" by the Global Hunger Index. It puts India even behind many of its South Asian neighbors, including Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

According to the National Institutes of Health, Indian officials have argued that the GHI methodology is flawed, particularly for its reliance on child-specific metrics to represent the entire population's hunger levels.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in 1962, writes, “The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.” 

On those lines, the Modi government has always been talking about tomorrows, the future....a bright future for all the citizens of this nation.

Never believe data released by such foreign institutions. They are always fake because they are running an agenda.