India ranks 136th out of 146 countries in the World Happiness Report 2022

The World Happiness Report 2022 was released by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network on Friday and India once again finds itself amongst the 11 most unhappy countries on the list.

What is the World Happiness Report?

The World Happiness Report is a survey of the state of global happiness that ranks 146 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the report which ranks the countries on the basis of questions from the Gallup World Poll (GWP).

The surveys ask respondents to indicate on a 1-10 scale how much social support they feel they have if something goes wrong, their freedom to make their own life choices, their perception of the level of corruption in the society, and their generosity. The results are then correlated with other factors, including GDP and social security.

India’s Performance on the World Happiness Report 2022

India scored 3.78, equating to 37.8 percentage points on the World Happiness Report 2022. India’s overall score has been on a steady decline over the last few years - moving lower from 4.57 in 2015 to 3.78 in 2022. India was ranked 136 amongst 146 countries assessed in the 2022 report.

The contribution of 'GDP Per Capita' to India's overall score in 2022 has increased significantly since 2015. However, India’s overall score continues to be weighed down by two key variables:

• Generosity: It is the national average of GWP responses to the donation question “Have you donated money to a charity in the past month? India’s score on Generosity in 2022 was 0.198 in comparison to 0.265 in 2015 showing that Indians donate much lesser in now than a few years ago.
• Perceptions of corruption: It is the average of GWP answers to two GWP questions: “Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country or not?” and “Is corruption widespread within businesses in this country or not?” Based on the scores, it appears that people’s perception of corruption in India is much more in 2022 than in 2015.

Finland earned the top spot in 2022 with a performance score of 7.82 for the fifth consecutive year followed by Denmark at 7.64. India’s ranking of 136 was lower than that of Togo but higher than Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Lesotho, Botswana, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Lebanon, and Afghanistan which occupied the bottom ten positions on the World Happiness Report 2022.

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Components of the World Happiness Report

The following six variables contribute to explaining life evaluations and are scored on individuals’ own assessments of their lives.

• GDP per capita is in terms of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) adjusted to constant 2017 international dollars.
• Social support is the national average to the Gallup World Poll (GWP) question “If you were in trouble, do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them, or not?”
• Healthy life expectancy at birth is constructed based on data from the World Health Organization (WHO).
• Freedom to make life choices is the national average to the GWP question “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?”
• Generosity is the residual of regressing the national average of GWP responses to the donation question “Have you donated money to a charity in the past month?” on log GDP per capita.
• Perceptions of corruption are the average of binary answers to two GWP questions: “Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country or not?” and “Is corruption widespread within businesses in this country or not?”
• The value for Dystopia (1.83) is the predicted Cantril ladder for a hypothetical country with the world’s lowest values for each of the six variables. This permits the calculated contributions from the six factors to be zero or positive for every actual country.