As India ranks 122nd on the list of the happiest countries in the world, Norway stands on the first, according to the reports. India ranked at 122 out of 155 countries in the World Happiness Report 2017. The report was released on Monday at the United Nations at an event celebrating International Day of Happiness.
India was behind the majority of Saarc nations, apart from war-ravaged Afghanistan, that stood at 141. Among the eight Saarc nations, Pakistan was at 80th position, Nepal stood at 99, Bhutan at 97, Bangladesh at 110 while Sri Lanka was at 120. However, Maldives did not figure in the World Happiness Report.
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Noway moved from number four to number one. The entire top ten were wealthier developed nations. Yet money is not the only ingredient in the recipe for happiness, according to the reports.
In fact, among the wealthier countries, the differences in happiness levels had a lot to do with “differences in mental health, physical health and personal relationships: the biggest single source of misery is mental illness,” the report said. “Income differences matter more in poorer countries, but even their mental illness is a major source of misery,” it added.
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“What works in the Nordic countries is a sense of community and understanding in the common good,” said Meik Wiking, chief executive officer of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, who wasn’t part of the global scientific study that came out with the rankings.
The rankings are based on gross domestic product per person, healthy life expectancy with four factors from global surveys. In those surveys, people give scores from 1 to 10 on how much social support they feel they have if something goes wrong, their freedom to make their own life choices, their sense of how corrupt their society is and how generous they are.