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The share of undernourished Indians has more than halved over the past two decades, from 21.1 per cent in 2004-06 to 9.8 per cent in 2023-25 — a decline of roughly 101 million people, from 243.9 million to 142.5 million, according to a new United Nations (UN) report released on July 21, 2026.
Yet, a staggering 100 million people go hungry in the country. And hunger is only part of the picture; a second worrying trend is how many Indians simply cannot afford a healthy diet.
As of 2025, 520.1 million people, or 35.5 per cent of the population, fell into this category, according to the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026 report by UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The share of this figure in the population has come down from 59.8 per cent in 2017, but it still means more than one in three Indians cannot regularly afford food that is nutritionally adequate, even if they are consuming enough calories to avoid hunger.
Healthy food has become more expensive relative to real incomes. India’s healthy-diet cost has risen faster since 2017 — up nearly 48 per cent — compared to about 32 per cent in the US over the same period.
In 2025, it cost $4.11 per person per day in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms to eat a nutritionally adequate diet in India. PPP dollars adjust for exchange-rate differences and in this context it shows how much share nutritious food takes up of the real purchasing power in India, compared to other countries.
Within South Asia, the cost of a healthy diet in India was the lowest among all countries except Pakistan, whose cost stood at $3.94, followed by India, Bangladesh ($4.59), Sri Lanka ($5.21) and Bhutan ($6.17), according to the report.
Elsewhere in Asia, the cost was lower in China ($3.64), but far higher in Japan ($8.27) and South Korea ($7.37). The same cost for developed countries like the United States was $2.86, or $2.75 for the United Kingdom.
But there has been progress. The UN report noted that the decline in the number of people unable to afford a healthy diet among lower-middle-income countries as a group is driven mainly by India. “If India is excluded from the group, the estimates show an increasing trend in the number of people unable to afford a healthy diet,” it said.
The report’s other indicators, on children’s growth, anaemia and obesity, complicate the picture.
In 2024, close to a third of Indian children under five, 32.9 per cent, were stunted, a marker of chronic undernutrition, down from 41.7 per cent in 2012. Wasting, a more acute form of malnutrition, stood at 18.7 per cent, still among the higher rates globally.
But even as child stunting fell, prevalence of overweight in children has been on an increasing trend — rising from 2.1 per cent to 3.7 per cent over the same period. Obesity among the adult population has double, while anaemia among women aged 15-49 has increased from 50.1 per cent to 53.7 per cent.