Survey on in state to measure happiness

Ongole: Do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them? Are you satisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life? Is corruption widespread throughout the government? How much is the corruption in private businesses? are a few questions that the public across the state is being asked by the survey officials now.

As part of the Andhra Pradesh’s Vision 2029, the government wants to focus on the matters including psychological wellbeing, health, time use, education and wants to calculate them on few parameters. The Happiness Index is such one, which has a questionnaire to identify if happiness prevails in society and based on the score achieved in it, the government has a scope to understand where it should work more.

AP is the second state after Madhya Pradesh in the country to establish a happiness department under the AP State Development Planning Society. The state government trained survey officials under planning department to conduct the happiness index survey and asked to collect 1,500 samples from each district, totaling 19,500 samples from the state. 

The survey is being done according to rural and urban ratios in the districts and a sample of 13,896 will be taken from rural areas while the remaining 5,596 will be taken from urban areas. The sample is being collected from two selected villages in each of 670 mandals and two wards each from 57 municipalities, selected from half of the municipalities in each district.

That means, 84 percent of the 1,500 samples will be collected from rural areas in Srikakulam district while 47 percent of 1,500 samples will be collected from urban areas in Visakhapatnam district. KT Venkaiah, Chief Planning Officer of the Prakasam district, said in Prakasam district, 44 survey officers are conducting the happiness index survey in 80 percent of rural area and 20 percent of urban area.

He said all categories of people will be considered for taking survey giving equal preference to men and women. The public will answer questions on a scale from 0 to 10, where 10 is the happiest or positive, in Cantril life ladder. The survey will be helpful to government to know public and their priorities more and the areas it should concentrate for betterment, he added.

In the first happiness index survey held in 2017, AP stood in 74th position in world with the rating of 5.368 points. In the same survey, Srikakulam became the happiest district with 6.414 points and Prakasam district is the least happy district with 4.679 points..