Adapting an experiential scale to measure food insecurity in urban slum households of India

In the background of the Sustainable Development Goal 2.1 which proposes promoting universal access to food to all populations across the globe by 2030, this paper measures experiential food insecurity in low income urban households of India. A nine-item experience-based food security scale is constructed by adapting the United States Household Food Security Survey Module in the context of slum households of Kolkata, according to which 15.4% of the households are food insecure. Findings also indicate that multi-sectoral interventions are required to tackle the problem of urban food insecurity - nutritional interventions combined with appropriate education and income support programs and employment generation schemes. Additionally, the experiential indicator has excellent potential to be an alternative metric to measure household food security in urban India.