Happiness, beyond measure

People are jumping on to the Gross National Happiness bandwagon, in an attempt to capture something that remains elusive

what their priorities are. Given the ideology of the government, you know what people want, or should want. At best, you synergise across schemes. This also illustrates why discussions on happiness that mention both Bhutan and Venezuela in the same breath are misleading.

I don’t think it is fair to place UAE in the same bracket either. In 2016, UAE announced a new ministry (and minister of state) for happiness. It may be early days, but so far, all this ministry seems to have done is to train officers from federal and local government to become “chief happiness and positivity officers”. I am not sure the UN General Assembly Resolution of July 19, 2011 was a very good idea: “(1) Invites Member States to pursue the elaboration of additional measures that better capture the importance of the pursuit of happiness and well-being in development with a view to guiding their public policies; (2) Invites those Member States that have taken initiatives to develop new indicators, and other initiatives, to share information thereon with the Secretary-general as a contribution to the United Nations development agenda, including the Millennium Development Goals”.

Irrespective of what is done to public policy formulation, people are jumping on to the bandwagon of measuring and pushing something that is, at best, elusive. The UN’S World Happiness Report, an annual feature since 2012, is based on diverse indicators across GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make choices, generosity and perceptions of corruption (trust). Measure a country’s distance from the perfect dystopia and you have a rank and a score. In 2016, India had a rank of 118 out of 150 countries.

If citizens are happier in a certain country, presumably people would want to migrate there, given a choice. In 2016, the top three countries were Denmark, Switzerland and Iceland and both Nepal and Bangladesh have higher ranks than India. It is worth checking out the number of Indian immigrants to these five countries. Among India’s states, Madhya Pradesh was the first one to start a happiness department in 2016. It is early days there too. At the moment, the focus is on volunteers training people to positively impact the lives of others. This is thus an attempt to bring about behavioural changes in people, not behavioural changes within government.

Such disparity across three countries and a state should remind you of the clichéd blind men and the elephant and perhaps of John Godfrey Saxe’s poem too. Most people will remember how the poem starts. “It was six men of Indostan..” And this is how it ends: “So, oft in theologic wars/ The disputants, I ween/ Rail on in utter ignorance/ Of what each other mean/ And prate about an Elephant/ Not one of them has seen!” For happiness too, theology is a good expression, because that’s what the fetish about measurement has reduced it too. The means of measurement have become more important than the end.

The writer is a member of Niti Aayog. Views are personal