Happiness

Many Believe Life Was Better in 1975 Than in 2025

March 20th marks the International Day of Happiness when citizens across the world celebrate happiness as the fundamental human goal. And to make happiness all pervasive, this year’s theme is about fostering the spirit of, Caring and Sharing. And to see how India is doing on happiness and has done in the last one year, we aggregated the happiness scores for the past one year.

Happiness in a Complex World

The west zone citizens and those from tier 1 cities, emerge happiest. The south zone shows major recovery in Happiness.

Report Releases by Ipsos India in 2024

Citizens in the west zone (88%) & tier 1 (85%) cities are the happiest; the East Zone has seen a major drop in happiness due to unrest in Kolkata and Manipur & vagaries of weather

Ipsos IndiaBus is a monthly, pan India omnibus (which also runs multiple client surveys), that uses a structured questionnaire and is conducted by Ipsos India on diverse topics among 2200+ respondents from SEC A, B and C households, covering adults of both genders from all four zones in the country. The survey is conducted in metros, tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3 towns, providing a more robust and representative view of urban Indians. The respondents were polled face to face and online. There is city-level quota for each demographic segment that ensures the waves are identical with no additional sampling error. The data is weighted by demographics and city-class population to arrive at national average. Data collection is done every month, and the results are calculated on two-months’ rolling sample.

Citizens of tier1, east, north and west zone, full time parents & homemakers, 45+ age group & with low education emerge happiest

The survey also captured happiness across a host of parameters and interestingly for most of the parameters, citizens reported an increase in happiness over the previous month.