INTRODUCTION‌

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imilar to seers and philosophers, economists, were also party to human’s quest for a better tomorrow. We have been a witness to a number of notions coming in from the literature of Economics in this area—starting with

a very humble and layman’s word like ‘progress’ to technical terms like ‘growth’, ‘development’ and ‘human development’. With greater dependence on the idea of the ‘economic man’, the world created immense wealth in the post-War decades. It was in the 1980s that social scientists started finer studies in the area of mankind’s actions, finally challenging the very idea of the ‘economic man’ (‘rational man’). Thus starts mankind’s urge to introspect the lives of humanity on the planet earth. Meanwhile, humanity was faced with an unique riddle of climate change. By now, courtesy the UNO, the world has the World Happiness Report.