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By Manoj Nadkarni
How meaningful is Gross National Happiness in a country totally dependent on aid? How meaningful is Bhutan's rejection of materialism when materialism is simply not an option for a predominantly rural population, with no access to markets? How significant is Bhutan's claim that it has more monks than soldiers when India provides most of Bhutan's defence?
In Trashigang town, people from villages in the district had come to get photographed for the new photo ID cards, and many were making a party out of the trip. Some football teams from Sherabtse College had also come to celebrate a victory and were going around all the shops singing and collecting contributions. It seemed quite lively for such a small town, more so because people had left their cars parked for long periods of time with their warning lights on.
I took the Thimpu bus early next morning. This time it was raining quite heavily and the forests looked thicker and darker. In many places the clouds stuck to the hillsides and the bus had to go painfully slowly through the dense fog. The road was quite bad in several stretches; there was repair work going on in most sections. It was not surprising given the terrain -- steep inclines on muddy hillsides that are attacked by freezing cold, hot summers, and heavy monsoon rains every year.
One of the ways in which Gross National Happiness (GNH) is often understood is that it serves to ensure that basic equitable infrastructure development takes place in a manner that creates an environment where happiness can be achieved. In other words, it says that people cannot be happy if they do not have enough to eat, if their children are dying, if their neighbours possess a lot more wealth than they do. Phuntosho Namgay of the Royal Institute of Management had put it to me very simply: "GNH is a guarantee of basic needs being met." In a similar vein, Pema Dhendup, project officer, water and sanitation, Unicef, said: "GNH is a question of the quality of life. There needs to be a basic quality of life before questions of happiness can be dealt with. In this sense, water and sanitation is fundamental to GNH."
In an attempt to translate this into reality, rural areas are included in every bit of planning. Civil servants, or those with years of experience behind them, are often shifted away from the capital and into rural areas so that a talent pool does not accumulate in Thimpu. Village community level and block level organisations are given a large say in planning. Though the drive for development and decentralisation comes from the centre, local demand for such things as water pipelines, roads and bridges, is meaningfully created and addressed. Beneficiaries provide labour, so a sense of ownership is created.
There has been a massive effort towards rural electrification; even if a village consists of one or two houses way up on a mountain, the government tries to build power lines up to it. There is also an emphasis on increasing the number of schools so that the three-hour-long walk children have to take in some places to attend school is reduced. Rural basic healthcare centres are more visible here than in India . Along with this there is a move towards regional balance and equity amongst the different provinces. For instance, if a specialist eye hospital is set up in one province, a heart hospital will be planned for another district, funding permitting.
Another benefit of consciously planned rural development is that, as Lam Dorji, executive director of the Royal Society for the Protection of Nature explained, it makes rural areas attractive, cancelling out both the 'push' that a villager experiences to migrate to urban centres because of lack of options in rural areas (especially for the well-qualified, since rural education drives have been relatively successful) and the 'pull' -- the attraction of large towns for their amenities and job opportunities.
Despite such successes there is one fact that bothers me, and that is Bhutan 's dependence on India . What can you say about GNH if the country is totally dependent on aid? When it is proudly said that this is a country with more monks than soldiers, the reply could be that it is because India , to a large extent, provides most of Bhutan 's defence. Very simply, Gross National Happiness is paid for by someone else. As an example, it is obvious that Bhutan 's environmental conservation comes at the cost of the environment in another country: the ecological footprint of Bhutan extends into India . Will Bhutan be able to survive without aid at some stage? Most people I spoke to, in government or multilateral organisations, were candid about the fact that at least in the near future there was no way Bhutan could manage without financial support. Karma Ura told me: "We will need aid for infrastructure for a while yet. Some roads can be built with village labour and village taxes, and this may be sufficient for mule tracks but not for hard surface roads. Investment apart from taxes becomes necessary then. But we will reach a stage soon, where maintenance will not need outside aid, only new construction."
This seems to be the majority view. Gerald Daly of the World Food Programme pointed out that the country had been very selective in its aid choices, and no money was accepted for projects that could be damaging to the environment or to the culture.
It seemed that apart from me, the relationship with India did not seem troubling to anyone else. It was seen not as a case of one country giving aid to another, but that of a good working relationship between two equals. India provides military and infrastructural support and in turn gets a strong, stable country able to resist Chinese military and economic overtures. India helps build hydro power plants in Bhutan , which provide cheap electricity to parts of West Bengal and the northeastern states. During the period of my stay in the country, the king made public appearances when high-ranking Indian military personnel or government officials visited. This was proof of how important the relationship between the two countries is, since the king makes few public appearances otherwise.
Occasionally, however, this dependence has been used for political purposes. For instance, it has been hinted that Bhutan 's military operations against the various Indian separatist groups hiding in the country were influenced by financial pressure brought about by the Indian government.
What was also worrying was the Tala hydroelectric power plant. My questions about Bhutan 's financial dependence on India were often answered with references to this plant in southwestern Bhutan . Built by India and slated to go online in 2007, its job will be to provide cheap electricity to nearby Indian states. It seemed a lot was riding on the revenue to be generated by this plant, not just for debt repayments but also to finance new projects. I even heard suggestions that eventually Bhutan would become like one of the oil-rich Gulf states with hydroelectric power playing the role that oil plays in these states. To me, it did seem like an example of over-reliance on one source of revenue.
When I mentioned this to Dr Sanjay Mehta, head of the economics department at Sherabtse College , he agreed and wondered what would happen if India developed instead the hydropower potential of Arunachal Pradesh or Sikkim , which had similar hydrological features. India would not need Tala then, except to honour its commitments. He pointed out that Bhutan had not developed any other real alternative sources of revenue, which was problematic. Even the much-mentioned tourism revenue is actually tiny, and it will be quite a while before Bhutan can seriously export any agricultural products.
Bhutan has no magic formula, he said. The country would have to struggle to find the right route, just like all other developing countries, and make many mistakes along the way. Dr Mehta thought that GNH was a nice phrase, perhaps useful as a policy guideline, but in the end meaningless if there was no economic growth to pay for it all. Buddhism and cultural wisdom, and the non-materialist and conservation ethic were not real everyday signifiers of economic policy: materialism was not an option for the predominantly rural population simply due to lack of access to markets. Even with TV showing the good materialistic life, most of the goods available to Indians, for example, were unattainable to the Bhutanese. As a way to illustrate this, Dr Mehta noted the really low savings rate in Bhutan . There could be many reasons for this but his argument was that people in the country do spend when they can.
Another fact in the country's favour is its low population and low population density, which is an extremely unusual situation for a South Asian country. "Because of the low population, there is no real competition for resources, so of course the environment is pristine. The pressures that exist in India or Bangladesh just do not exist here. This also means that environmental conservation is easier to incorporate into policy," Dr Mehta said. The government recognises the importance of a low population, and bringing down the population growth rate from the present 3.1% is a part of the Ninth Five-Year Plan.
The question of population however brings to attention the one blot on Bhutan 's copybook: the refugee problem. The country's population is estimated to be around 650,000 and a census has just begun. According to dissidents -- most of whom live in self-styled exile abroad -- the population used to be double that figure until the Bhutanese government took away the citizenship of a large number of people of Nepalese origin (dissident websites say as much as a sixth of the population was deprived of citizenship), and summarily tossed them out of the country, forcing them to live in refugee camps in Nepal. This was a supposed attempt by the government to alter the kingdom's demography in favour of the ruling ethnic group, based on a fear that a similar increase in the Hindu Nepalese-origin population had turned Sikkim into a Hindu Nepali-majority state -- which then led to its annexation by India in 1975.
Dr Mehta and his matter-of-fact economic views -- though perhaps in contrast to the standard beatific opinions of the country's development I was given -- reflected what I was beginning to understand after talking to college students, shopkeepers, children in the few but always busy video arcades and forestry and environment workers. As people started becoming familiar with me they dropped the 'received wisdom views' and gave me what they saw as 'the real picture'. A small landlocked country with a small population wrestling with many, if not all, the problems that countries in South Asia face.
These were not radically different views but in my mind they did help transform Bhutan into a 'real' place, rather than Shangrila. It must be remembered that Shangrila was not even a myth, just fiction. Bhutan has taken the less-trodden development path, and the notion of happiness will serve a useful function in its development. Fortunately, the country also has some more mundane factors in its favour that will ease its journey along the chosen path to happiness and development.
InfoChange News & Features, May 2005
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