The recently published world Happiness Report (WHR) 2025 in which India is ranked #118 below countries like Pakistan (#109), Iran (99), Saudi Arabia (32),Turkiye (94), Nepal (92), Gabon, Kenya, Mozambique and even war-devastated Palestine (108) and Ukraine (111), is a resounding slap on the establishment.
Unsurprisingly, politicos and the media have reacted indignantly to WHR 2025 questioning the report’s intent, methodology and conclusions. However it’s important to note that the authors of the report are respected dons of globally top-ranked universities and include Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University (USA), and WHR 2025 is published by Oxford University’s Wellbeing Research Centre in partnership with Gallup (the globally respected market research company) and the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Development Network. That’s an impressive partnership by any reckoning.
To assess the happiness/wellbeing of nations, the authors of WHR 2025 have ideated eight parameters of happiness, viz, GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, perception of corruption and ‘dystopia’. Invoking these innovative parameters the authors explain how societies/countries that have cultures of caring and compassion; sharing meals, happiness and social connection; living with others (household size and family bonds); wide social connections; supporting others through prosocial behaviour; trusting strangers and discharging acts of benevolence and charity are happy. Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden despite their gloomy climates, top WHR 2025. USA, the world’s richest, most inventive and most militarily powerful country, is ranked #24 and UK #23.
WHR 2025 has been greeted with wry cynicism in the Indian media. Especially because neighbouring Pakistan is ranked higher. Yet instead of making light of this insights rich study, it would be advisable for apologists of India’s self-serving establishment to note that according to some recent research (podcaster R.N. Bhasker), 90 percent of India’s citizens subsist on a per capita income lower than of Sub-Saharan Africa, suffering deprivations unimaginable to the top 10 percent.
Almost a century ago, Prof. Arnold Toynbee in his seminal eight-volume A Study of History posited that great civilisations evolved and flourished because their “creative minorities” (elites) provided good governance and inventive goods and services for the benefit of the majority “proletariat” at the bottom of the social pyramid. But when due to excessive self-indulgence and effete epicureanism creative elites transformed into oppressive minorities, the proletariat ‘seceded’ from the implicit social contract and great civilisations disintegrated into chaos and fell.
Most Indian historians haven’t studied Toynbee’s monumental masterpiece. If they had, they would have predicted that post-independence India’s ‘civilisation’ built on an inorganic public sector and pervasive neta-babu corruption is on the brink of collapse. WHR 2025 is an obituary.
