New Delhi: In Hyderabad’s Taj Deccan last year, Smriti Irani, then India’s Women and Child Development Minister, took the stage to talk about the future role of women. Soon, she was firing off a mix of sharp humour and calculated outrage in defence of the Modi government. The provocation was a question on India’s dismal 111th ranking in the 2023 Global Hunger Index, a measure of undernourishment among 125 countries that had just been released.

“People say the index is hogwash,” she declared by equating her fleeting inconvenience of missed meals due to busy schedules to the undernutrition, hunger and poverty that the metrics measured.

“I left my house in Delhi in the morning at 4 today. I caught a flight at 5 to go to Kochi. I did a conclave there, caught a flight at 5 o'clock to come to this programme. By the time I get to anything called food, it will be 10 o'clock. If you called me anytime in the day today and asked from Gallup (the survey agency) are you hungry, I'll say 'Oh yes, I am.”

While bristling at the ratings, what the minister didn’t reveal was that her ministry had over the past year made multiple attempts at lobbying with the publishers of the Global Hunger Index to bump up India’s ranking.

The government wanted the publishers to make critical changes to how they score the countries. One of them was to focus less on malnutrition among children, an indicator where India performed poorly – even by the government's own admission – and dragged down its overall score. The government thought the hunger index was too “biased” towards children and even argued that a large number of infant deaths aren’t actually tied to malnutrition.

This was not an isolated attempt at influencing a global index. The Reporters’ Collective investigation has revealed that it is part of a “whole-of-government approach” devised by the Prime Minister’s Office to closely monitor 30 global indices and reach out to agencies that publish the indices to convince them to change their parameters – what they measure –  if India is doing badly in their reports, which it often does.

To exclusively track these indices, a nodal unit named “Global Indices for Reform and Growth” (GIRG) has been set up. It functions as a perception management agency, complete with a media outreach cell, to manage how India is being talked about and present a rosier picture.

Documents reviewed by The Collective show at least 19 Union ministries and departments have been tasked to closely monitor what these global indices are saying about India – from the level of hunger in the country, health and education, press freedom to the state of democracy.

The Indian missions abroad too, have been roped in to speak to the publishers of the indices and report back to the government.

The Modi government aims to ultimately create its own indices. It is the easiest way for the government to run down these global indices with which it often has had a problem over the methodology employed.

To achieve all this, the government roped in a Gujarat-based IT firm, which previously made news for offering “online reputation management services” to the BJP, to create a full-fledged indices tracking software. The company had come under fire from Facebook in 2019 for “coordinated efforts to manipulate public debate” in favour of the BJP. 

Internally, officials have been candid about why the government wants control over indices: “national governments (would) have complete ownership over this measure.” The government behind closed doors has bluntly admitted that the focus is on bumping up India’s ranking. Senior officials, on record, have even asked ministries to "suggest their own parameters" for "showcasing India's ranking on global indices is improving".

Some criticisms by the Indian government of the biases in global indices, especially against countries in the global south, are valid and are echoed by independent experts. But how the government chooses to respond to its rankings in these indices reveals its priority. The focus is on massaging the data to make India look better at any cost possible rather than fixing the underlying problems.

Ranking the world

Global indices measure how well a country is doing in important areas. These areas can include government performance, social and economic development, or health and education. Agencies choose the parameters that best show the results for each area.

For example, the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index assigns each country a cumulative score based on its performance in four areas concerning women: economic participation, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. Each parameter is further broken down. "Health and survival," for instance, includes the "sex ratio at birth" and "healthy life expectancy."

India was ranked 129 out of the 146 countries in the most recent index, dropping two spots from its 2023 position.

The world’s nations are also ranked by the quality of its democracy and perceived corruption. International organisations such as the World Bank and the UN use rankings on some indices to allocate funds and advocate for policy changes. Businesses can rely on indices to decide where to invest or expand.

The Economist Intelligence Unit, which publishes the Global Democracy Index, offers tools to help businesses identify stable and safe regions. Firms, particularly from wealthier countries, can use this data to guide investments.

There are frailties too. All 30 indices monitored by the Modi government are published by agencies in the developed world. The publishers’ priorities can be influenced by the dominant ideologies in the region they are based in.

For instance, the Economic Freedom of the World Index prioritises economic liberalisation. This approach puts at disadvantage lower- and middle-income economies like India, which rely on government subsidies for social security and small businesses.

Another concern is the reliability of data used to score the countries. Index publishers source some of the data from organisations such as the United Nations, which in turn source it from countries’ official data sources. The agencies standardise data across countries, some of which are vulnerable to manipulation as unscrupulous or dictatorial governments may be tempted to fudge numbers to paint a positive picture.

While some criticisms of global indices are valid, the Indian government’s response highlights a different issue: its focus on doctoring perceptions rather than addressing the underlying fundamental problems.

India versus global indices

While the Modi government has consistently criticised global rankings and their methodologies as flawed or has dismissed the problems they highlight as non-existent, it is now revealed that the government went to great lengths to improve its rankings.

On February 5, 2020, then cabinet secretary Rajiv Gauba called for setting up a unit for monitoring what the indices were saying about India. Over the next couple of years, the government looked at which indices should be included in its monitoring list. The Prime Minister’s Office was actively involved and was regularly seeking updates on this.

The government’s plans were grand. It listed down 30 indices that would be tracked in an exercise spearheaded by its think tank NITI Aayog.

Each index was assigned to a ministry or a department based on jurisdiction. So, the Financial Development Index was assigned to the department of economic affairs while the Global Hunger Index would be tracked by the ministry of women and child development. The ministries would then map out the parameters and sub-parameters the publishing agency was tracking.

Each sub-parameter was further assigned to other ministries that would then be responsible for it. So, while the Global Innovation Index was assigned to the NITI Aayog, it further roped in the departments of school and higher education to track the “education” and “tertiary education” parameters.

Once this expansive network, which also included autonomous institutions such as the Election Commission of India, SEBI and the Reserve Bank of India, was set up, the second layer of operations kicked in.

Each ministry would then look into how India was being scored in the index they were assigned and work to fix it. The modus operandi was to find numbers that discredit the parameter India has performed poorly in rather than solve the problems the rankings highlighted.

While press releases and statements like the one by Irani were a regular feature of the government’s response, GIRG unit put a method to this madness.

Each parameter would be scrutinised: Is it quantifiable like “life expectancy” or subjective like “political culture”? How is the agency sourcing data for this parameter? Does the government officially publish this data, and, if not, is there a different parameter that can act as a substitute?

Lacunae would be identified: whether the data the agency is relying on is outdated or sourced from unofficial sources or whether the parameters are based on opinion polls of industry executives, which could be dismissed as unreliable.

The ministry responsible for tracking the index began compiling all such arguments and then triggered the lobbying machinery. The government gets in touch with the publishing agency to force them to “course correct”. For that it could use Indian missions abroad to talk to the publishers. Documents show the missions talked to publishers of Global Gender Gap Index, Global Democracy Index and Global Competitiveness Index. At times, the government tracked down India-based individual researchers working on such indices, as it did when the Democracy Index ranked the country at 51 among 167 countries in 2019.

The government’s National Informatics Centre Services Inc. which develops government websites and software was roped in to set up a dedicated dashboard. They brought in Silver Touch Technologies Limited, to develop the dashboard.

Silver Touch, an Ahmedabad-based IT company, had earlier offered “online reputation management” services to political parties, with reports of having done so for BJP-ruled state governments. It had been red-flagged by Facebook for creating fake accounts to manipulate public debate in favour of BJP during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and its pages were purged.

Silver Touch delivered the dashboard. The dashboard functions as a comprehensive, multi-ministerial interface. It tracks 30 indices, with their parameters clearly mapped to the relevant ministries. Each ministry or department can update the parameters with the latest or preferred data and even add additional parameters beyond those used by global index publishers. A separate feature also enables the government to create its own indices by selecting custom parameters.

GIRG was now fight-ready. 

Are you hungry?

The 2019 Global Hunger Index ranking had sparked intense criticism of the Union government. The index published by German non-profit Welthungerhilfe and Irish NGO Concern Worldwide, ranked India 102 among 117 countries. The index scores countries on four parameters: prevalence of undernourishment, child mortality rate, and percentages of children under five suffering from stunting and wasting.

The non-profits bank on the data that the countries give to WHO, the Food and Agriculture Organization, UNICEF and the World Bank.

For instance, they rely on the UN Inter-Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation for its child mortality parameter. The UN agency in turn depends on a number of official data sets – like India’s National Family Health Survey, Sample Registration System or the Census to estimate child mortality for the country. Once the UN agency has collected data from across the world, it applies its own calculations to determine levels of child mortality. Non-profits like Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide then use this data, standardised across countries, to score them on the child mortality parameter.

A question was raised in Parliament about India’s disastrous ranking. The government replied on February 4, 2020, that India has made “consistent improvement” when compared to its score nearly two decades ago. A day later, then Union Women and Child Development Secretary Rabindra Panwar wrote to the heads of Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide complaining about India’s poor performance in the index.

“The data used, with regard to India, for calculations of the index are dated; thereby the report does not reflect the progress India has been making in improvement of nutritional status in the country,” he argued.

Panwar pointed out that if the index relied on more recent Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey and Sample Registration System data, India’s ranking would improve from 102 to 91.

A day later, then Women and Child Development Minister Smriti Irani wrote to Niti Aayog, asking the think tank to get in touch with the publishers of the Global Hunger Index and “rectify the issues observed in the index”.

The government framed its key arguments against the index. It suggested using data from its Comprehensive National Nutritional Survey, which showed a drastic reduction in wasting and stunting among children. However, in the same breath it noted that the survey it recommended “was conducted for the first time and the consistency of the survey is unclear.”

The government argued that the hunger index gave too much importance to undernutrition among children. “Three of the four indicators refer to children below five who constitute only 11.5% of India’s population. Therefore, the term “hunger index” is highly biased towards undernutrition of children rather than representing the status of hunger of the overall population,” it said.

The government made this argument despite the fact that nutritional deficiencies in the initial years of life deeply impact an individual’s overall physical and mental health. This is why it runs multiple programmes, including the First 1000 Days, tailored to this crucial stage of life.

Publicly, the government has dismissed the Global Hunger Index, calling it a version of “child health index” rather than a true measure of hunger. The government’s argument is that if the index was a true measure of hunger, then the state’s massive programmes such as the National Food Security Act, which feeds 80 crore people daily, and other schemes for vulnerable groups, would have been counted and earned it a better rank.

However, the index goes beyond simply measuring the availability of food (calories) and looks at the broader impact of malnutrition, particularly on children, caused by the grave lack of essential nutrients such as child wasting, stunting and child mortality.

Going by the official figures, a staggering 67.1% of infants are anaemic. Further, 35.5% infants suffer from stunting and 19.3% from wasting. These two were the indicators responsible for India’s dismal performance on the index.

While the government bashed the Global Hunger Index publicly, officials in an internal meeting to find ways to influence the index, were candid about how India was performing. In a November 2020 meeting, officials of Niti Aayog, department of food and public distribution, ministry of health, ministry of women and child development and ministry of education said: “The prevalence of wasting, stunting and under 5 mortality rates are significantly high irrespective of the improvement of India’s rank from the previous year.”

Further proof that the government knows the importance of nutrition while it publicly quibbled over semantics is the fortification programme it runs to supply nutritious diet for millions of people. It has officially said that it runs the programme to quell India’s “Hidden Hunger” – a term used to refer to high malnutrition levels.

The department of food and public distribution further poked holes in the official argument that touts public distribution system (PDS) as an antidote to hunger. “Under Food Security Act more than 67% of the population is covered. However, the data is based on the 2011 census, and therefore the unavailability of data has emerged as the main concern which is delaying the calculation of the correct estimates,” they noted.

“The targeting of the PDS is not happening efficiently, as the states are free to choose their selection criteria due to which many sections that must be included under PDS are not being included,” they added.

Yet, the government found fault with how the two non-profits were measuring hunger, saying they focused too much on children and used factors like stunting and wasting, which measure nutrition levels, not hunger.

It even argued that child mortality should not be considered for measuring hunger since only 45% of global deaths among children can be linked to nutrition.

In its response, Concern Worldwide pointed out that it has used the most recently available nutrition data sourced from the same entities in all 127 countries up to July 2019 for its report. Any data published after its deadline, such as the Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey the Indian government recommended and was published in October 2019, would be included in the next version of the index after review.

Further, it pointed out that the emphasis of children's nutrition was justified since it’s linked to overall health. Additionally, they pointed out that household-level nutrition data does not capture inequalities in access to food within the family.

“We know you would fully support that children’s nutritional status deserves particular attention because a deficiency of nutrients places them at high risk of physical and mental impairment and death,” the two non-profits told then Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant in a letter dated July 29, 2020.

India continued to perform poorly between 2020 and 2023, with its rank slipping from 94 in 2020 to 111 in 2023 under the Global Hunger Index. 

Even as recently as July 2024, the union government wrote to the two non-profits asking them to accept alternative data sources to compute the index. The non-profits declined. India’s 2024 rank stood at 105 out of 127 countries.

It is unlikely that the government would give up looking for new ways to bump up India’s ranking.

One of them is to create its own versions of the global indices, based on parameters that it decides and the data it creates, proving that if you don't like the rules, you can always invent a game you're guaranteed to win.

More on it in part 2 of the series.

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This is the first part of our investigative series: The Ministry of Truth.