Measuring Happiness can be a tacky matter. After all, happiness is not such a tangible thing. It is like what makes for a perfect holiday – is it the beach or is it the mountains? Beaches it is for me, but for many others, it may be the treks and hikes that mountain trails offer. So it is with happiness. Can one measure it? Well, the world is trying. Gallup, the well-known pollster published the 10th edition of their World Happiness Report last month, complete with an Index listing the Happiness levels of Countries as judged by them. In that ranking, Finland is the happiest country in the world as per the Global Happiness Index for 2022 and Afghanistan the unhappiest at number 149. India is not far from the bottom at 136 and Bhutan which was the country that started measuring happiness is 95th.
How does Gallup measure Happiness though? Quite differently from how Bhutan does. The Gallup initiative is a part of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network and allied to the United Nations, Sustainable Development Goals which tracks progress in health, sanitation, gender equity, conflicts, education, and several others. The Gallup rationale is that the most famous statistics — GDP, household income, and unemployment — focus on the rational side of what people do: what they spend, how much they make, and whether they have a job, and that these metrics like these do not tell us anything about people’s happiness.
The methodology of Gallup is wider and the Happiness Index is certainly widely cited. Since its launch in 2012, the World Happiness Report has captured worldwide media attention and has been featured in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Huffington Post, U.S. News and World Report, Newsday Health, and Smithsonian and is Gallup’s most downloaded and widely cited data. Although the fruit basket is now bigger and more diverse now, it still makes an assumption that good drains and well-lit streets along with a long life expectancy among other things make for a happy life.
Bhutan began measuring happiness earlier and differently and dipping into Buddhist philosophy with the premise that happiness does not lie in the accumulation of worldly progress alone; whether individually or corporately as a country. The phrase ‘gross national happiness was first coined by the 4th King of Bhutan, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in 1972 when he declared, “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product.”
The concept implies that sustainable development should take a holistic approach towards notions of progress and give equal importance to non-economic aspects of wellbeing. When Bhutan’s prime minister introduced Gross National Happiness to a United Nations forum as a paradigm for alternative development in 1998, it turned heads and spawned a global industry in happiness.
Since then Think tanks have dissected it, and governments grappling with improving social policies have paused to take a serious look. Today World Happiness Summits are held globally and often, The U.N. has declared a World Happiness Day( 20th March) Students enrol in happiness courses. Yale reported its most popular class ever in 2018 on how to live a happy life( A course I have taken through the Coursera platform). And in the middle of the Covid Pandemic, the Delhi school system announced it is adding happiness to its curriculum — citing Bhutan.
So Bhutan measures Happiness differently and how! Divining gross national happiness is a matter of minutely categorising and carefully tracking the lives of Bhutan’s 800,000 citizens. Every five years under the direction of the Centre for Bhutan Studies and GNH Research, survey-takers fan out across the country to conduct questionnaires of some 8,000 randomly selected households. The complex survey is broken down into nine “domains,” 33 “indicators” and hundreds more variables. The broad categories include psychological well-being, health, time use, education, culture, good governance, community vitality, ecology, and living standards.( The 9 domains).
One feature distinguishing Bhutan’s GNH Index from the other models is that the other models are designed for secular governments and do not include religious behaviour measurement components.
Some questions from the Bhutan questionnaire “Do you meditate?” “How frequently do you pray?” They ask how much time and money you devote to the immediate community, how many hours one sleeps, and how many hours one works Some questions might bewilder us: How often do you quarrel with your family? How long do you stay away from them? Do you trust your neighbours ?
However, while the idea of Gross National Happiness may have put Bhutan on the map, the concept has been hijacked by the West, through other models as we have seen and quantified to a degree that makes it unrecognisable to those who developed the original one.
Gross national happiness is rooted in the principles of the country’s religion, Buddhism, with its focus on compassion, contentment and calmness. Measuring the Gross National Happiness is not an academic exercise. It has policy implications for the government and the country as the requirement is to make policies that will enhance and sustain happiness.
The ‘GNH Policy Lens’ requires that the policy consequences on all relevant dimensions be considered prior to implementation. In addition, project screening tools are to be implemented in nearly twenty project areas, including agriculture, forestry, trade and manufacturing, media and information, youths, as well as projects that focus on each of the nine dimensions. The 2008 constitution dictates that lawmakers must take each into account when considering new legislation the four pillars of GNH which are good governance, sustainable development, preservation and promotion of culture, and environmental conservation.
Since GNH was adopted as the main measure of growth in Bhutan, almost 100 percent of its children are enrolled in school and the country has nearly doubled its life expectancy. Educational policy has also been affected by GNH principles. Children now learn about agricultural practices and environmental protection alongside math and science. Meditation is also a typical part of the school day as well. In addition, the country’s waste-management program ensures that all materials used in schools are recycled. Thanks to Bhutan, the world’s definition of what a successful country is may be changing. While GDP is still widely used as a measure of development, the use of Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index and other happiness measuring indices are increasing too.
