India Should Rank Higher In World Happiness Index: Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

India ranked 118th in the World Happiness Report 2025 published recently, 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.

Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar addressed The State of Happiness 2025 event on World Happiness Day in Washington, DC at the global launch of the World Happiness Report. Gurudev strongly disagreed with India's low position amongst 147 countries ranked on the list. “Creating global happiness rankings is crucial to fostering awareness among nations. However, I disagree with India’s placement behind some of the countries steeped in conflict. Having traveled extensively around the world, I feel India’s ranking deserves to be much higher,” Gurudev said.

Also read: World Happiness Report 2025: Where Do India and Pakistan Stand?

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.

This year’s World Happiness Report ranks India 118th out of 147 countries, with a happiness score of 4.389. 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, according to PTI.