UPPSC 2022 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 73 of 150

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.

• (a)110th — 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)130th — 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)140th — 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.

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.

This is a pure current-affairs recall item, and the only defence is to anchor the number to the edition rather than to the country. The trap that costs marks is quoting a rank from a different year, because these index ranks move every twelve months and coaching material is often a year stale. Two habits help. First, always ask 'out of how many' — 136 out of 146 tells a far more definite story than 136 alone. Second, keep the World Happiness Report separate from the Human Development Index: different publisher, different method, different number. The HDI is a computed composite of life expectancy, education and income, whereas the happiness ranking is a survey of what people say about their own lives. UPPSC has asked both in successive years, so mixing them is expensive.

• World Happiness Report 2022 — the tenth-anniversary edition, released in March 2022, ranked 146 countries
• India was 136th; Finland was first for the fifth consecutive year; Afghanistan was last at 146th with a score of 2.523
• Rankings come from the Gallup World Poll's Cantril ladder, on which respondents rate their own life from 0 to 10
• Six explanatory variables are used to account for the differences: GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption
• India's later ranks, for contrast only: 126th in 2023, 126th in 2024, 118th in 2025 — do not quote these for a 2022 question

• Quoting a later edition's rank for a 2022 question — India was 136th in 2022 but 126th in 2023 and 2024
• Confusing the World Happiness Report with the Human Development Index; different publisher, method and numbers
• Giving the rank without the field size, which hides how far down the table a country actually sits

UPPSC asks these index questions as bare rank recall, tied to the edition released a few months before the exam, and has done so for the happiness report, the Human Development Report and the SDG India Index alike. UPSC almost never asks the rank itself; it asks who publishes an index and what goes into it, so prepare the rank for UPPSC and the methodology for UPSC.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The country rankings in the World Happiness Report are based primarily on

  • (a)Per capita income and life expectancy computed from national statistics
  • (b)Respondents' own evaluations of their lives on the Cantril ladder in the Gallup World Poll
  • (c)Government expenditure on health, education and social welfare as a share of GDP
  • (d)An expert panel's assessment of mental-health service coverage

  Answer(b) Respondents' own evaluations of their lives on the Cantril ladder in the Gallup World Poll — the six factors such as GDP per capita and social support are used to explain the scores, not to compute the rank.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which country was ranked first in the World Happiness Report, 2022?

  • (a)Denmark
  • (b)Finland
  • (c)Iceland
  • (d)Switzerland

  Answer(b) Finland — it topped the 2022 table for the fifth consecutive year, with Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland and the Netherlands close behind.