Achieving economic growth and all-round happiness is in the hands of every citizen

There is a need to enhance women's participation at all levels as they are found to be more productive and capable. Women's happiness makes the entire universe happy as they also attend to developmental aspects of the society, nay nation

March 20 is celebrated as the International Happiness Day. For all of us the object of life is to live happily and experience happiness along with others every day. Happiness brings lot of good positive feelings and emotions and inspires us to do good things. It is therefore imperative for every state and government to provide an environment and ecosystem with more and more citizen-friendly initiatives that can enhance their prosperity right into the future.

It goes without saying that the primary requirement for happiness is economic prosperity and country's GDP and real growth, including per capita income, irrespective of whether the country is in the high income, middle income or in the low income group. Apart from providing the basic necessities of life like food, shelter, clean drinking water, and electricity, among others, the focus should also be on addressing social infrastructure issues like education, health, public utilities, and physical infrastructure like roads, port, railways and air services. The level of income provides scope for more or less private investment and savings apart from influencing one’s consumption pragmatism. There must be opportunities for suitable and profitable employment engagement, scope for self-employment or entrepreneurship.

It is therefore a government’s endeavour to promote private investment and private enterprise initiatives to provide opportunities for qualified and skilled professionals and youngsters, in successful corporates and business enterprises. While it is a fact that there is a wide gap between the rich and poor world over, the richer ones get a higher share of wealth and a large part of the population is in the lower or middle income group.

To make them happier, the goal of the government should be to ensure inclusive growth, growth with equity and providing opportunities to every strata of the society. Apart from well-established corporates, the successful growth of startups as well new generation companies with advanced technological innovation, have given opportunities for the experienced and highly qualified youth to focus on their startup enterprise, which has disrupted the traditional products and services and has resulted in higher valuation. This mandates providing higher education to the young generation without any constraints of finance, so as to tap the skills of all talented young for a complete utilisation of the demographic dividend.

Women play an important role in ensuring family happiness. It is therefore necessary to provide education, employment and leadership roles to women employees or engage them in any craft, enterprises or provide equal opportunity in corporate leadership or academic professions. There is a need to enhance women's participation at all levels as they are found to be more productive and capable. Women's happiness makes the entire universe happy as they also attend to developmental aspects of the society, nay nation. The United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution, around 10 years back, proclaiming every March 20 as the International Day of Happiness. Since then it is believed that the success of any country should be measured and judged by the cumulative happiness of their citizens.

During Covid-19, people from all over the world, especially those from low developed countries, were in misery due to lack of adequate medical facilities to contain further damage of the pandemic.

Almost all countries suffered heavily in terms of output loss due to shut down. The negative or low GDP growth further widened the gap between rich and poor. This reduced the happiness quotient to significant levels. The impact has been so enormous that less developed and low income countries are still suffering from high debt, high inflation and low economic growth. They are unable to provide essentials like food security and energy security.

It is hence necessary that global cooperation and multilateralism should be strengthened. Developed countries should extend financial, technological and every other form of help to help the less developed nations to be on the recovery track.

Also every country should take proactive steps to mitigate the climate risks and make investments towards reducing emissions so as to bring down the temperature to below 1.5°C level. This entails huge investments in alternative green energy initiatives and shed the dependence on fossil fuels. Climate related disasters will have catastrophic effect as they lead to massive human, flora and fauna and financial losses, which will add to human sufferings.

In order to remove and reduce income and health disparities, every nation should strive to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. It is presumed that Covid-19 and poor economic growth can adversely impact fulfilling the SDG. A way out could be in widening and broadening the Sustainable Development Goals by blending one’s well-being and environmental policy dimensions in order to ensure happiness of future generations. According to the World Happiness Report 2023 "these rights and goals are essential tools for increasing human happiness and reducing misery now and into the future."

'Sarve Jana Sukhino Bhavantu' should be the governing mantra and the driving force of every country, its citizens, corporate houses and institutions.

In the present geo political situation, with wars and conflicts causing heavy bloodshed, there is a need to reduce hatred, conflict and avoid war and respect the sovereign rights as history shows that such disturbances result in greater misery and huge economic losses which will take long time to rebuild the economy. In order to achieve the objective of ‘Universal Happiness’, there should be an end to wars, conflicts and human destruction.

As regrads India, we all must be fully involved in realising the mission of ‘Viksit Bharat’ as it aims to bring about happiness to every Indian citizen. The seeds of prosperity have to be laid right now and we all must put our heart and soul to ensure that the seeds sown today will bear fruit and usher in prosperity and happiness tomorrow.

(The author is former Chairman & Managing Director of Indian Overseas Bank)