While India’s abysmally low rank of 133 in terms of a measure of happiness during 2015-17 in a sample of 156 countries in the World Happiness Report (WHR) 2018 is stunning, it would be naive, if not mistaken, to take the rankings at face value.
Happiness is measured using subjective perceptions of well-being. Specifically, it is based on answers to the Cantril ladder question asking respondents to value their lives today on a 0 to 10 scale, with the worst possible life as a 0 and the best possible life as a 10. The distribution of the national average evaluations is