According to 'World Happiness Index – 2022' what is the rank of India ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, 136th. The World Happiness Report 2022, released in March 2022 as the tenth-anniversary edition of the series, ranked 146 countries and placed India 136th. The exam was held on 12 June 2022, so this was a current-affairs item barely three months old at the time. The report is built on the Gallup World Poll: people are asked to rate their own lives on the Cantril ladder, a 0-to-10 scale where 10 is the best possible life and 0 the worst, and countries are ranked on those self-assessments averaged over three years. Finland topped the 2022 table for the fifth year running, and Afghanistan came last at 146th with a score of 2.523. For a student reading this in 2026, India's position has since improved — 126th in the 2023 and 2024 editions and 118th in 2025 — but the answer to this question is the 2022 figure, 136th.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Far above where the 2022 edition actually placed India. With 146 countries ranked that year, 110th would put India in the middle-lower band rather than near the bottom, and the report's own table gives 136th.  (b) The near miss, and the only distractor a well-prepared candidate would hesitate over. It is in the right region of the table but is not the published figure; the World Happiness Report 2022 records India at 136 out of 146.  (d) Too low. With only 146 countries ranked, 140th would put India among the bottom seven, close to the war-torn and famine-affected states at the very foot of the table — Afghanistan was last at 146th. India's actual position in the 2022 report was 136th.

Concept: The World Happiness Report is an annual publication of the series begun in 2012; the 2022 edition was produced under the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and from 2024 the report has been published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford with Gallup and the SDSN. Its ranking is not an expert assessment but a survey result: the Gallup World Poll asks respondents in each country to place their present life on the Cantril ladder, and the national average of those answers is the score that decides the rank. The report then tries to EXPLAIN the differences in those scores using six variables — real GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption. Those six do not compute the rank; they account for it.

State PCS 2022 Q73 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q73 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer