India has ranked 100th out of 122 countries in the 2026 Global Hunger Index, and the country is still stuck in the index’s ‘serious’ category with a score of 24.1.

The index was released jointly by the German aid organisation Welthungerhilfe and the Irish group Concern Worldwide. Partner organisations the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict and the Swiss group Helvetas also took part. The report was datelined New Delhi on October 24.

The numbers are hard to read as anything but a warning. India has not climbed out of the ‘serious’ category since 2012. That is more than a decade stuck in the same band, even as the country’s leaders present India as a rising global power.

The Modi government’s hunger problem

The report lands at a politically sensitive moment. The Narendra Modi-led NDA government has been in power for 12 years, and it has repeatedly promoted India as a development powerhouse competing with the world’s largest economies and on track to become the third-largest economic power. Hunger data tells a different story. The source material describes the country’s progress on hunger as a caterpillar that has crawled in place, moving nowhere despite years of effort.

Progress has almost stopped. Between 2018 and 2026, India’s score improved by only 1.7 points, falling from 25.8 to 24.1. In the 2006 to 2012 period, the score improved by 8.2 points. The pace of improvement has collapsed to a fraction of what it was.

Children are paying the price

The most alarming figure in the index concerns children. Wasting, defined as a child being too thin for their age, has climbed to 19 percent in India. That is up from 16.9 percent in the earlier reading. It is the highest rate in South Asia, a region that already has the worst child wasting rate of any region in the world.

Stunting is also widespread. Around 29 percent of children under five in India suffer from stunted growth, a share the report describes as very high. Overall, 9.8 percent of India’s population is undernourished.

Those figures land hard because they point to the youngest citizens, whose bodies and brains are still developing. A child who is wasted or stunted today carries that disadvantage into adulthood.

Progress in reducing hunger in India has slowed, and the country’s score remains in the ‘serious’ category, a band it has not left since 2012.

A region under pressure

India’s problem sits inside a wider regional picture that is not encouraging. South Asia’s score stands at 23.5, and the region’s child wasting rate of 15.8 percent is the highest of any region in the world. The index notes that progress has stalled in many countries over recent years.

Two countries stand out for getting worse. Pakistan, in particular, has seen its situation deteriorate compared with 2018. India, by contrast, has improved slightly over that period, but only just.

Why the ranking matters beyond the numbers

A ranking of 100th out of 122 is not a rounding error. It places India among the countries where hunger remains a daily reality for millions, even as the national economy is held up as a success story. The gap between economic ambition and nutritional outcomes is the central tension the index exposes.

The report is likely to fuel a broader national debate over how growth translates into food security. Questions about child nutrition, the pace of reform and whether official development claims match the lived reality of families will now sit at the centre of the conversation.

The index does not offer a single cause for the stall. What it does offer is a clear set of markers: a score barely moving, a child wasting rate climbing, and a country that has spent more than a decade in the same danger category. For a nation that wants to be seen as a global leader, those are numbers that demand an answer.