Happiness Index-2024

The happiness index and the level of happiness in the world are reports published by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a global initiative of the United Nations. Every year, a report is compiled determining changing trends in happiness with a quest to seek out how best the people of the day are quantifiably happy all over the world. The rankings of international happiness are obtained from the assessments and findings of a global survey taken up by the polling company Gallup, Inc., also known as the Cantril Ladder survey, which uses a number of parameters that are comparable. In this survey, people are asked to foresee and visualize a ladder individually, with a perfect life rated as ten and the worst possible life rated as 0. They are then enquired to evaluate their current lives on this 0–10 scale. The statements are analyzed, evaluated, and correlated with several other life factors. The life factor parameters applied in the survey report specify determinants usually linked with inequalities in national-level life assessments and appraisals. Though a few variables, such as joblessness and inequality, are omitted due to the unprocurable comparable information across the countries. The embracing of subjective measurements of well-being represents an out-reach method, allowing respondents to evaluate their well-being. In the report published in March 2024, Indians constitute the unhappiest people in the world, which to every one of us is implausible and farfetched. These findings have come forth in the annual World Happiness Report of 2024, in which life satisfaction across parameters of economy, freedom, generosity, corruption-free, social support, and health have been surveyed. India ranked 126 out of the 144 countries in the world, recording a decline from last year’s 125th position. As per the report, happiness is also spreading to a large number of other countries. The report also brings forth the findings, signifying that welfare is an issue amongst the young generation and that the happiness disparity differences between a few countries are widening throughout the world. Aggregately, the world, on average, is turning into an unhappier domain presently than it happened to be earlier. The report has also brought up in its findings that happiness has no longer remained confined to the world’s richest and largest countries but has shown strikingly unique, path-breaking, and insightful trends. In the 2024 report, U.S. A is ranked as the Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and Israel are the other happiest countries on this list. The report reveals that Afghanistan is the least happy country in the world, followed by Congo, Sierra Leone, Lesotho, and Lebanon. India’s rank has also been depressingly low with respect to the happiness of people in the report indicating happiness is still eluding people of the country.

Happiness Inquest

Happiness, being a relatively complex aggregation, is generally difficult to measure. However, happiness represents an inspiration for human beings and constitutes a gamut of aspects that are highly variable. Generally, happiness is a relative and temporary satisfaction and happening of events but is an inseparable and most cherished aspect of life, aggregately toting grace and elegance to its very existence. Going by the broad-spectrum principles, happiness would mean and matter differently to diverse people. Generalizing it as such is exceedingly difficult in dissimilarly positioned countries with extensively indelible differences in socio-economic set-up, culture, level of development, climate, living style, set of problems and opportunities, and many other intricate living essentials. However, over the years, the United Nations, through the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, has charted out gages and testers to assess the level of happiness for comparison purposes all over the world. These indicators, which primarily focus on wellbeing, life satisfaction, life evaluation, and happiness with life as a whole, are discursively prerequisites for the economic prosperity, development, and wellbeing of the people of any country, focusing on the multifaceted life lived by modern societies. Over almost a decade, the yearly happiness index issued shows that happiness is eluding India, and the people of the country are comparatively deprived and rundown, missing this vital facet of life. The happiness index issued by the United Nations through their research and survey ranked India at 117th in 2015, 118th in 2016, 122 in 2017, 133rd in 2018, 140th in 2019, 144th in 2020, 139th in 2021, 136th in 2022, and 126th in 2023 (published in March 2024), which is a noteworthy and tantalizing finding. India’s happiness index has been hovering around between 117th and 144th, and is this the starkest reality? In 2018, when India was ranked 133rd on the index, Late President Pranab Mukherjee remarked and attributed India’s position to a “narrow-vision focus on economic development." “[It] may have given us a better GDP and an increase in per capita income, but we moved our focus from environmental sustainability to social welfare and the emotional and mental wellbeing of our people.” The International Monetary Fund, in response to this year’s survey, concurred that while GDP per capita is a “significant predictor of happiness, it’s not the only factor”. “Variables including social support, life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and the absence of corruption” explain why some countries are happier than others. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar dismissed the ranking in 2018. “You should actually tell everybody to come to Bengaluru—you can see which is the world’s happiest place, particularly on a Friday night,” he said in an interaction with college students in Bengaluru. The anomaly is thus evident both in perceiving and imagining the happiness. Despite this, the annual happiness reports offer rich signals through the systematic surveys and analysis of happiness and do communicate and clarify much about ways to improve the world’s happiness and living standards. Therefore, what really matters to people in modern societies is to enrich their ability to gauge and assess themselves, whether their life through the lens of time is improving or not. Another important eye-opening and interesting insight that is enough to awaken countries and people is why some countries regularly seal the topmost positions in the World Happiness Index while others nosedive to show unsatisfactory results consistently. The best-performing countries can serve as an example to those poorly performing nations and corroborate with each other. The policymakers accordingly need to reflect and provide a way forward by providing robustness in the system and lifting some ideas to infuse reforms that shall enable to end the unhappiness of people.

Need for Cognizance

The unswervingly low level of happiness indicated in the index is an issue and inaptness that needs to be pondered and deliberated upon, which is why India, despite being on the highest pedestal of hassled development paths, transformation, and change, is grappling with despicably low levels of happiness. Why are people, despite so much of venturing, efforts, and pomposity from the government, not happy? This is a question that deserves to seeks introspection and open up a number of invoking and thought-provoking queries. Why is it so that despite the country’s robust march and ensuing the idea of transforming into a “Vishwa Guru," it is unable to make, seek, and brand its people’s happiness. Are people not connected and contended by development trajectories, or are policies and development programs lopsided, missing articulation and target? Is capitalism eating out the happiness of people through pronounced inequalities? Undeniably, that does not seem to be the case. Then, is it that all useful schemes propelled and launched by the government do not reach the grass-roots level or to a common man, or do spurs, incentives, and freebies fail to strike effect and lack efficacy, or do people want India to be developed and projected more impact-fully with more renewed vitality on a reformed pedestal, or is it all this that keeps people in India yearning and alluring for happiness? These are a few convincing and realistic questions that need to be implored by everyone’s cognition, be it a common man, policymakers, bureaucrats, religious luminaries, politicians, political parties, planners or decision-makers. It also raises pertinent questions among the Cognizant’s about “when will India be happy” and how far it has to traverse further to set the ringing tunes for permeating happiness and make the people and the country happy.

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