New Delhi, Oct 18 (IANS): Former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram has alleged that the government was in a denial mode on the poverty and hunger index rankings.

He said on Tuesday, "Sadly, the Modi government is in denial mode as was evident when it rejected India's 107 ranking in the Global Hunger Index."

"The UNDP and the Oxford HDI have confirmed what we have said several times: that the UPA government had the best record in lifting people out of poverty.The Report released on 17-10-2022 has confirmed that 27.39 crore were lifted out of poverty in the 10 years of the UPA government".

"Yet, it is a stern warning to India that 16.4 per cent of the population (22.8 crore) was still poor in 2019-20.That number got worse in the subsequent two years because of the pandemic and the lockdowns.The first task of any government is to overcome the challenges of poverty, hunger and malnutrition," he added.

The Centre on Saturday said misinformation seems to be the hallmark of the annually released Global Hunger Index.

The Global Hunger Report 2022 released by Concern Worldwide and Welt Hunger Hilfe, Non-Government Organisations from Ireland and Germany, respectively, has ranked India at 107 among 121 countries.

"The index is an erroneous measure of hunger and suffers from serious methodological issues. Three out of the four indicators used for calculation of the index are related to the health of children and cannot be representative of the entire population. The fourth and most important indicator estimate of Proportion of Undernourished (PoU) population is based on an opinion poll conducted on a very small sample size of 3,000," said a statement by the Ministry of Women and Child Development.