Globally, the twenty-first century has developed enough to measure the happiness of its inhabitants by using multidimensional indicators. Different people resonate with the term “happiness” and the path to achieve it differently, and the same applies when we discuss countries at the macro-level. The World Happiness Report (WHR), prepared majorly after the 2020 pandemic by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, is based on the countries’ understanding of what happiness means by considering their respective subjective approaches. India, the most populous country in the world with 1.43 billion people (UNFPA’s State of World Population Report 2023), has been ranked relatively much lower than other developing nations in happiness ratings.
This research explores how well the WHR’s indicators align with Indian realities. The study facilitates the contemporary discourse around the adequacy and suitability of these reports to contribute to further assessment of the well-being of the people. It examines whether the indicators used in the WHR are suitable for ranking countries by their happiness levels.
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