India ranks lower on global happiness indices than Pakistan and Bangladesh — but the real scandal is that these surveys measure happiness through a purely Western, consumerist lens. Prof. Mala Kapadia’s Hitaayu-Sukhaayu framework is the world’s first happiness index built entirely on Ayurveda and Indian Knowledge Systems.
Prof. Kapadia traces how happiness measurement began with Bhutan’s 1975 Gross National Happiness initiative and was quickly captured by Western consulting firms that defined wellbeing in materialistic, individualistic terms — completely ignoring spirituality, ecology, and social harmony. She argues that showing India as perpetually unhappy serves a pharmaceutical agenda: creating markets for anti-anxiety drugs among youth who are mentally colonised into believing their indigenous way of life is inferior.
Her framework challenges the very vocabulary of “developed” versus “developing” nations, proposing Hitaayu (beneficial life) and Sukhaayu (joyful life) as indices that actually capture civilisational flourishing — and calls on India’s youth to decolonise their mental models before any authentic wellbeing is possible.

About the Speaker:
Prof. Mala Kapadia is the Director-Special Projects at Siddhanta Knowledge Foundation, and was a Principal Investigator for the Hitayu- Sukhayu project under the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) division of the Ministry of Education. A scholar of Ayurveda and psychology with over three decades of research and teaching experience, her work explores Ayurveda as a preventive framework for global challenges, particularly youth mental health. She is the author of Sukha Sutra, a concise exposition of her Hitāyu–Sukhāyu framework for holistic well-being rooted in Ayurvedic wisdom, and is associated with the development of a Bharatiya well-being index.