Bhopal: ‘Only governments can create enabling conditions for happiness’

Bhopal: ‘Only governments can create enabling conditions for happiness’

FPJ BureauUpdated: Wednesday, May 29, 2019, 11:59 PM IST
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Bhopal: Happiness – just like anxiety, love, hatred and other human emotions – is generally perceived as something abstract – unquantifiable and immeasurable. Is it not true that some are unhappy even amid opulence of the highest order while others are cheerful even in the midst of penury? Some draw happiness from material possessions; others look for it in spiritualism. Some feel happy serving others; others are self-centred to the core. Some get happiness in gorging delicacies; others are contended with their spartan diet.

But there are those who don’t agree with this postulation. And Tshoki Zangmo and Karma Wangdi – both from the Centre for Bhutan Studies and Gross National Happiness – are two of them. They are here to participate in the International Workshop on Development of Happiness Index for the State of MP, organised by the state government in association with IIT, Kharagpur.

Talking with Free Press, they said that they have a different take on happiness. For them happiness is not about “fleeting pleasure”. It is about a sense of well-being and there are hundreds nay thousands of factors which contribute to it. Their Centre has devised a “Happiness Index” based on nine domains, 33 indicators and 124 variables and they cover issues ranging from good governance to health to education to use of time to cultural divergence and a feeling of safety.

The idea that happiness can be measured and it can and should be promoted, they said, was the brainchild of Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who was the monarch of Bhutan from 1972 until his abdication in favour of his eldest son in 2006. At his initiative, the Centre for Bhutan Studies and Gross National Happiness was born and after painstaking work that lasted for seven years, it came out with an index to measure happiness.

“The governments have an enormous role to play in making people happy. It is the government that can create the enabling conditions for happiness”, they said.

They said that they were happy to note that the Madhya Pradesh Government has established a Department of Happiness and was trying to develop a happiness index. “Balance between subjective and objective measures, actionability and reliability”, they said are the hallmarks of a good happiness index.

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