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) onated; 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.