The Great Indian Unhappiness: What a new report says about India’s young and old

India remains one of the world’s least happy nations, reveals the World Happiness Report 2024; older people are happier than the youth

Indians are among the unhappiest people in the world. The observation comes from the annual World Happiness Report, a measure of global life satisfaction across parameters of health, economy and freedom. Out of 143 countries, India ranked 126 — a marginal dip from last year’s 125th position — falling behind the war-torn Palestine and Ukraine, and neighbours like Pakistan and Nepal. The quest for happiness is also eluding most countries, the report finds. Welfare is a concern among the young, and the ‘happiness inequality’ gap is growing almost everywhere.

The report was a collaborative effort between Gallup, the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre. Researchers analysed global datasets assessing six factors: healthy life expectancy, GDP per capita, social support, freedom, generosity and perception of corruption. They also measured people’s life satisfaction, through a self-assessed evaluation tool called the Cantril ladder. “Think of a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top represents the best possible life for you, the bottom is the worst possible scenario. Which step do you personally feel you stand at this time?”

The world, on average, is unhappier than before. “For the first time, happiest nations no longer include any of the world’s largest countries,” the authors said. The U.S. didn’t earn a spot in the top 20 countries, a first in 12 years of the report’s publication. Finland, on the other hand, managed to occupy the top spot for the seventh year in a row. The bottom end of the list names Afghanistan, which has seen the sharpest decline in happiness since 2006-10, the report noted. The country is in the midst of humanitarian, climate and economic crises, since the Taliban regained control in 2020.

This was the first edition that looked at the intersectionality of life satisfaction with age and generations: happiness for the world’s young and old diverges into two different arcs. The younger (under 30) are happier in Central and Eastern European countries; the reverse is true for countries like the U.S. and Canada, where life satisfaction was highest among those 60 and above. “...this has not always been the case. Between 2006 and 2010, young people in Northern America and Australia/New Zealand were just as happy as old people. Their life satisfaction has declined sharply since then...” the report notes. Among those born after 1980, happiness reportedly falls with each passing year. The authors noted that “the relationship that we knew existed between age and happiness is far more nuanced than previously thought, and it is changing”.

India is an anomaly. Here, life satisfaction was found to be higher among the older people. At 140 million, India’s older population is the second largest in the world and growing steadily, with the average growth rate “three times higher than the overall population growth rate”. The researchers relied on the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI, 2017-19) dataset and analysed the following metrics: satisfaction with living arrangements, perceived discrimination and self-rated health. Education, wealth, access to healthcare, support systems and social acceptance were also analysed. To their surprise, and a departure from scholarly research, older age in India was associated with higher life satisfaction. The opposite was believed to be true to so far. Age and life satisfaction go hand-in-hand only in high-income countries; the experiences of India’s old people were also defined by childhood, financial status, lack of social support, physical frailty, and feelings of loneliness.

A dissection of this trend makes visible caste and gender-based discrepancies. Older Indians who belonged to privileged castes, and “never experience[d] discrimination or ill-treatment” were “more satisfied with their lives”. Experiences of discrimination and ill-treatment, on the other hand, contributed “significantly to the caste-based discrepancies in life satisfaction”, the research showed. Caste backgrounds governed if one was able to access education, social services, health care or financial safety. People with secondary or higher education, and those of higher social castes, evidently reported higher life satisfaction than those without access to formal education and those from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Regionally, older adults from Western parts of India were much happier than those living in north-eastern or central regions.

The verdict on gender was more ambiguous. On average, older women in India reported lower life satisfaction than older men, but the trends reversed when other measures, such as social support were taken into account. “Women, in general, possess wider and more diverse social networks, including a greater number of friends and confidants, which likely translates into not only more social support but diverse forms of it,” the researchers explained. Previous research shows age compounds the gender and economic precarity of India’s older women: they are vulnerable to abuse, alienation and abandonment. They are also more likely to be excluded from the formal labour force, lack financial savings and access to pension schemes, and are more prone to health issues in comparison to older men.