The Global Flourishing Study is the largest thing of its kind: across 22 countries, run by Harvard's Human Flourishing Program with Baylor, Gallup and the Center for Open Science. It measures flourishing on two indices — what people say about their own lives, and what can be observed about their circumstances.
India places on the subjective index and on the objective one — joint last overall, tied with South Africa. These ranks come from the study's companion "report card" paper, not the flagship; the distinction matters if you plan to cite them.
Rank position only — the study's index values are not published per country in the report card, so bar height encodes rank, not score. India is highlighted at position 20.
The more unsettling finding is the shape of the curve. In most countries flourishing declines gently in midlife and recovers later. In India, Egypt, Kenya and Japan the pattern is — the youngest adults sit among the lowest-flourishing groups in the country.
Schematic. The study reports the U-shaped pattern for India but does not publish an India-specific age curve with values; this figure shows direction, not magnitudes.
One more reversal is worth sitting with. Across nearly every country in the study, married people report higher flourishing than the never-married. In India the coefficient runs the other way, at roughly . For a country where marriage remains close to universal and largely arranged, that is a finding about young adulthood specifically.
So the dividend arithmetic holds and the flourishing does not. The rest of this site asks what is sitting between the two.