India ranks 118th in World Happiness Report, Afghanistan is last

London: India ranked 118th in the World Happiness Report 2025 published Thursday, up from the 126th position in the previous year but below countries such as Nepal, Pakistan, Ukraine and Palestine.

The 13th edition of the annual report, released coinciding with the International Day of Happiness that falls on March 20 each year, focuses on the impact of caring and sharing on people’s happiness, including how sharing a meal increases happiness.

Finland is ranked as the happiest country in the world for the eighth consecutive year and other Nordic countries – Denmark, Iceland and Sweden – continued to remain in the top four, in that order.

The United Kingdom is at the 23rd position, the US is 24th and China stands at 68th position in the list of 147 countries this year. The State of Palestine is ranked 108th (103 in 2024) while Ukraine is at 111 rank (105 in 2024).

The annual report, published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford in partnership with Gallup, the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network ranks the countries according to the self-assessed life evaluations by those polled averaged over the years 2022–2024.

Country rankings for the three benevolent acts covered by the Gallup World Poll – donating, volunteering, and helping strangers – vary depending on cultural and institutional differences, the authors of the report said.

Researchers say that beyond health and wealth, some factors that influence happiness sound deceptively simple: sharing meals with others, having somebody to count on for social support, and household size.

While India ranked 118th overall, in terms of the 'Country rankings for six measures of benevolence', it was listed much higher at 57 for (how people) donated; at 10 for how people volunteered; 74 for helping a stranger, and in case of wallet returned by a neighbour (115), stranger (86) and police (93).

In India's neighbourhood, Afghanistan is again ranked as the unhappiest country in the world, this year 147th against last year's 143rd rank (last). While Nepal with 92nd rank (93 in 2024) and Pakistan, with 109th rank (108 in 2024) remained much ahead of India, Sri Lanka, with 133rd rank (128 in 2024) and Bangladesh 134th position (129 in 2024) lagged behind.

According to the World Happiness Report website, the annual report and much of the growing interest in happiness research “exists thanks to Bhutan,” which had sponsored a resolution for considering happiness for a holistic approach to development.

Bhutan's resolution was adopted by the UN General Assembly on July 19, 2011 and the first World Happiness Report was brought out in 2012. After the UN General Assembly adopted and declared March 20 as the International Day of Happiness, the World Happiness Report is released around that day each year.

However, Bhutan, which focuses on Gross National Happiness, does not feature in the ranking of the 147 countries in this year's World Happiness Report.

Explaining the methodology for this year's report, the authors wrote: “Our measurement of subjective wellbeing continues to rely on three main wellbeing indicators: life evaluations, positive emotions, and negative emotions. Our happiness rankings are based on life evaluations, as the more stable measure of the quality of people’s lives.” The Gallup World Poll remained the principal source of data in this report. Typically, around 1,000 responses are gathered annually for each country.

“There are many ways in which we care and share with each other. Perhaps the most universal example is sharing meals. People who eat frequently with others are a lot happier and this effect holds even taking into account household size.

“The increasing number of people who eat alone is one reason for declining wellbeing in the United States,” the report said.

Apart from the rankings, other findings of the report this year include how during 2024, the COVID-era surge in benevolent acts fell significantly but remained more than 10 per cent higher than 2017–19 levels almost everywhere and how in 2024, helping strangers remains significantly higher than in 2017–19 in all global regions, by a global average of 18 per cent.

The report's global happiness ranking is based on a single question from the Gallup World Poll: “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?” In the United States and parts of Europe, declining happiness and social trust have contributed significantly to the rise of political polarisation and votes against “the system,” the report found out.

But in brighter news, global research showed that people are much kinder than expected. “People’s fellow citizens are better than they think they are, and to realize that will make you happier, of course, but it’ll also change the way you think about your neighbors,” said John Helliwell, a founding editor of the World Happiness Report.

“And so you’re more inclined to think of a stranger in the street as simply a friend you haven’t met and not somebody who poses a threat to you,” said Helliwell, who is an economics professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.